Kai-Fu Lee stopped building AI models and started selling enterprise data infrastructure. Now 01.ai is heading for a Hong Kong IPO.

This article was published on July 20, 2026 Lee conceded the model race after DeepSeek. 01.ai now fine-tunes open-weight models and wraps them in data software for enterprises. Half of its business is outside China. 01.ai is pursuing a 2027 Hong Kong IPO after pivoting from building AI models to enterprise data infrastructure. Lee calls the product “Boss AI” and the company “the Palantir of China.” Kai-Fu Lee’s 01.ai is raising a pre-IPO round ahead of a planned Hong Kong listing in 2027, the former Google China chief told Bloomberg at the World AI Conference in Shanghai. The company is unwinding its offshore holding structure, the same prerequisite that Moonshot dismantled in May to clear its own path to a Hong Kong debut. Lee said the funding round would close around the time 01.ai publishes its first annual results. The fiscal year ends in December. The story behind the IPO is a strategic retreat that turned into a business. Lee founded 01.ai in 2023 to build frontier AI models and raised it to a $1 billion valuation with backing from Alibaba’s cloud unit. Then DeepSeek’s open-weight releases collapsed the economics of model training. Lee conceded the race. “Only a handful of co