WSJ: Tsinghua Talent Engine Behind Z.ai, Moonshot and DeepSeek Shows China's AI Leap Was No Accident

A WSJ feature traces the careers of Z.ai co-founder Tang Jie and Moonshot AI's Yang Zhilin — once a Tsinghua University professor and his student — alongside DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng to argue China's frontier-lab surge was built over more than a decade through the Tsinghua ecosystem, not overnight. Z.ai recently raised roughly $4B in Hong Kong and is planning a Shanghai listing that Forbes estimates has put Tang's personal stake at about $5B.