MINIMAX Sheds Its WAIC Bounce as a Global Chip Selloff Sinks Hong Kong AI

Sold on WAIC's Opening Bell

Two days ago, MINIMAX was the relief trade. It bounced 11.57% into WAIC 2026, Shanghai's World Artificial Intelligence Conference, on the bet that a marquee showcase for Chinese model makers would put a bid back under a beaten-down name. The conference opened July 17 — and the stock, along with the entire China AI complex, got sold. It's a textbook buy-the-rumor, sell-the-news, made worse by the fact that the macro turned on the exact same day. The perp now prints $28.10, down 9.36% over 24 hours and back below where the WAIC bounce even started. The underlying Hong Kong line, 0100.HK, fell 15.6% on the session, which maps onto the perp's move at the roughly 7.8 USD/HKD rate the oracle uses.

The Selloff Started on Wall Street

This wasn't a MiniMax story first — it was a chip story. Investors lost faith in the AI semiconductor trade, and the trigger was TSMC: the foundry lifted its 2026 capital-expenditure guide to $60–$64 billion from $52–$56 billion, which markets read not as confidence but as evidence of an AI capex arms race with uncertain payback. Micron sank 8%, the VanEck Semiconductor ETF dropped more than 4%, and the Nasdaq fell 1.47% on July 16. The selling rolled into Asia overnight and hit Hong Kong hard on July 17: the Hang Seng dropped 446 points and the Hang Seng Tech index fell 4.4%, with Z.ai (2513) down 28.5% and SMIC off nearly 10%. That MiniMax's larger peer Zhipu fell almost twice as hard is the tell — this was a broad de-rating of Chinese AI equity, not a company-specific miss.

The Overhang That Amplifies Every Drop

What makes MiniMax fall faster than it rises is the supply sitting on top of it. The July 9 lock-up expiry freed roughly 45% of the float — an unusually large release for a new listing — and the company followed it with a discounted HK$14.5 billion raise pairing new placement shares with convertible bonds. The result is a stock whose market cap has collapsed about 78% from its HK$410 billion March peak. With that much freely tradable stock and a placement anchor still overhead, there's no scarcity premium left to defend; the lock-up wave was always framed as a 'gut check' for Hong Kong's AI listings, and MiniMax is failing it more visibly than most. The gap to the Street stays wide — analysts still carry an average target north of HK$800 against a share now near HK$216 — but until that float is absorbed, every bounce is just supply looking for an exit.