Chaoyong AI Editorial Team

On the afternoon of October 28, the signing ceremony for 01.AI's headquarters project landing and cooperation agreement was held at the Hangzhou International Expo Center.

State-owned capital from both the Hangzhou municipal level and the Linping district level joined forces to invest a combined hundreds of millions of yuan in this large model company founded by Li Kaifu.

01.AI's headquarters will relocate from Beijing to Linping, where the new site will serve as the base for building an industrial AI transformation center.

The business registration steps came one step ahead of the official announcement.

01.AI (Hangzhou) Information Technology Co., Ltd. completed registration on October 23, located in Linping.

The day after the signing, Li Kaifu led a team on a field inspection in Linping, visiting Zhongjun Dinghu Future Cloud City and Chunfeng Power to conduct industrial matchmaking for the headquarters landing.

For Hangzhou, this marks another headquarters-level general-purpose large model project to land in the city, following DeepSeek and Tongyi Qianwen.

The cooperation entry point offered by Linping is very specific: around goods trade and service trade going global, build the "Linping Smart Chain Global" scenario, and use AI agent tools to help enterprises transform their business models.

01.AI's own positioning is already different from two years ago.

When it was founded in 2023, it was one of the "six little tigers of large models" focused on general-purpose foundation models.

At the end of 2024, it launched a strategic pivot, shifting from underlying large model R&D to industrial AI, launching the Wanzhi enterprise large model platform and the Wance enterprise AI decision-making platform for ToB and ToG customers.

In other words, it no longer tells its story through model parameters, but through enterprise orders and delivery cases.

The timing of this round of state-owned capital investment is also worth noting.

01.AI is currently in the Pre-IPO stage, and its previously public targets were to go public in 2027 and complete 1.5 billion yuan in orders by 2026.

Hangzhou state-owned capital entering at this point, while also relocating the headquarters to Linping, is equivalent to using local industrial resources to exchange for an equity stake in a Pre-IPO company's valuation and a commitment to industrial landing.

The hundreds of millions in state-owned capital investment combined with the headquarters relocation is essentially an alignment between local investment attraction logic and the company's listing timeline.

What Linping gets is an AI headquarters project with IPO expectations, and what 01.AI gets is the funding, scenarios, and local government endorsement needed to sprint toward listing.

However, whether the order growth of industrial AI can match the 1.5 billion yuan target depends on the actual paid penetration of the Wanzhi and Wance platforms among manufacturing and going-global enterprises, not on the investment amount at the signing ceremony.

After relocating its headquarters to Hangzhou, what 01.AI needs to prove is: by changing to another city, the order curve can also change to a different slope.