Saudi fund bets big on China’s Zhipu AI

Prosperity7, the capital fund of Saudi Aramco, has invested in China’s GenAI startup Zhipu AI in the latest $400 million fundraising round, according to Bloomberg quoting anonymous sources. The investment valued the Tsinghua University AI spin-off at about $3 billion. Zhipu AI’s backers include Chinese tech titans Alibaba and Tencent as well as food delivery giant Meituan. Fresh injections from the Saudi fund are flagged as the first well-known capital venture outside China to bet on the country’s AI industry to build an OpenAI alternative. A previous test conducted by Tsinghua University showed Baidu’s ERNIE Bot 4.0 and Zhipu AI’s GLM-4 as top China’s large language models in terms of overall capabilities. [Bloomberg]