AI Firm MiniMax Reports 159% Revenue Growth
Hong Kong-based AI foundation model company MiniMax Group announced its full-year 2025 financial results, reporting a 158.9% year-over-year increase in total revenue. The strong growth reflects the booming global market for foundational AI models and services.
Founded in 2021 by former SenseTime researchers, Shanghai-based MiniMax has raised over $1.1 billion from backers including Alibaba, Tencent, and, notably, a Chinese state-owned entity. The company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2026. MiniMax's latest model, M2.5, recently topped global rankings for token usage, an indicator of developer adoption. The company competes aggressively on price, with UBS analysts noting its usage has reached one-third of Anthropic's Claude at just one-tenth the cost. This highlights a broader geopolitical trend where Chinese open-source AI models are rapidly gaining market share. In February 2026, models from MiniMax, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek accounted for nearly two-thirds of the token usage among the top five new models on one major platform. In response to the global AI race, the U.S. Department of Defense is accelerating its "commercial-first" AI adoption strategy, with a requested budget of $13.4 billion for AI and autonomy in FY2026. The focus is on operational implementation for autonomous systems and decision support. For contractors, the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act directs the DoD to implement a new security framework for AI/ML. These standards will be incorporated into both the DFARS and the CMMC program, creating new, mandatory compliance hurdles for companies selling AI capabilities to the Pentagon. The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program remains a key pathway for tech firms into the defense sector. AI company Collaboration.Ai, for example, used initial SBIR funding to scale its platform, eventually securing over $40 million in Phase III contracts from the Air Force
