I used AI to rephrase some parts of this post. The ideas and thesis are entirely my own, not AI slop.

$MAAS is a company I've been bullish on for a while because I believe it's going through a meaningful AI transformation. Yes, the current financials don't look great. But I have my own thesis for why I think the market may be underestimating the story here.

Last time I posted my DD, many people called it AI slop. Fair enough. This time, I want to lay out my thesis again, along with my second YOLO.

One thing I've noticed recently is that a surprising number of ETFs have been increasing their positions in $MAAS, including a well-known China-focused ETF, the Invesco Golden Dragon China ETF ($PGJ).

For those who aren't familiar with $PGJ, let me introduce one of the oldest and most representative China ETFs: the Invesco Golden Dragon China ETF ($PGJ).

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PGJ launched on December 9, 2004, so it has now been running for more than 21 years. It tracks the Nasdaq Golden Dragon China Index, or HXC.

What makes it different is that it focuses on Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges. That means its exposure is quite different from ETFs that invest heavily in Hong Kong- or mainland-listed stocks (like KWEB, MCHI, or FXI).

To get into the index, a company generally needs to meet a few basic rules: it must trade on an eligible U.S. exchange, qualify as a China-based issuer under Nasdaq’s methodology, have a market cap of at least $100 million, average at least $250,000 in daily trading volume over the previous three months, and usually have been listed for at least three months.

The index uses modified market-cap weighting.

Nasdaq first weights companies by market cap, then applies caps to avoid too much concentration:

●  No stock can be above 8% at rebalancing.

●  The five largest companies can stay above 4%.

●  Every other stock is capped at 4%.

As of August 14, 2026, PGJ had roughly $92.7 million in assets, an expense ratio of 0.70%, and around 70 holdings.

What makes PGJ interesting is that it has basically lived through every major China ADR cycle of the past two decades: the rise of Chinese internet companies, the U.S. listing boom, tighter regulation, the U.S.-China audit dispute, COVID, the property slowdown, and more recently the rebound driven by policy support and new technology themes.

And its returns show just how volatile that ride has been.

Year	PGJ NAV Return
2017	60.0%
2018	-29.2%
2019	31.9%
2020	53.6%
2021	-42.8%
2022	-24.4%
2023	-2.5%
2024	5.9%
2025	13.7%
2026 YTD	-14.6%

The most dramatic part of that history was probably the 2020–2022 reversal.

In 2020, PGJ gained more than 53%, helped by loose global liquidity, strong Chinese internet growth, and the EV boom. By February 2021, the ETF had climbed to around $74.64, with Chinese ADRs trading at pretty rich valuations.

Then the whole setup changed.

2021: Regulation Changed the Way China ADRs Were Valued

In 2021, regulation tightened sharply across internet platforms, education, and other sectors.

Didi came under a cybersecurity review shortly after its U.S. listing, while the “double reduction” policy completely changed the after-school tutoring industry.

PGJ fell 42.8% that year.

From that point on, overseas investors stopped valuing Chinese ADRs based only on revenue growth and earnings. Regulation, VIE structures, U.S. listing risk, and U.S.-China relations all became part of the valuation framework.

2022: Delisting Risk Stayed Front and Center

In 2022, Chinese ADRs had to deal with several problems at the same time: slower economic growth, COVID disruptions, property weakness, and U.S. audit pressure.

The Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act created a real fear that many Chinese companies could eventually be forced off U.S. exchanges.

That pressure only started to ease toward the end of the year, when the PCAOB said it had obtained full access to inspect audit firms in mainland China and Hong Kong.

PGJ fell another 24.4% in 2022, making it two brutal years in a row.

2023: A Waiting Game

2023 was much quieter.

There was no major catalyst strong enough to change the trend, and Chinese ADRs mostly traded sideways while investors waited for a clearer macro or policy turning point.

PGJ finished the year down about 2.5%.

2024: Policy Support Brought Buyers Back

Things changed again in September 2024, when China rolled out a series of economic stimulus measures.

Chinese ADRs rallied fast. The Nasdaq Golden Dragon China Index gained close to 30% that month, while PGJ jumped around 23% in a single week.

It was another reminder that Chinese ADRs are still extremely sensitive to policy expectations and changes in risk appetite.

2025: DeepSeek Put Chinese Tech Back on the Global Radar

Then came DeepSeek.

In early 2025, DeepSeek pushed global investors to take another look at the technical capabilities of Chinese AI companies. At the same time, policy signals toward the private sector became more supportive.

By the end of February, the Golden Dragon China Index was already up more than 13% for the year.

PGJ eventually finished 2025 up 13.7%.

2026: Back to a More Mixed Market

In 2026, performance became more uneven again.

By the end of July, PGJ was down roughly 15% year to date.

But the headline return only tells part of the story.

If you want to understand what could drive PGJ next, it’s more useful to look at what the ETF actually owns now, and how that mix is changing.

What Does PGJ Hold Today?

As of July 31, 2026, PGJ’s top 10 holdings were:

Rank	Company	Ticker	Weight
1	Yum China	YUMC	9.2%
2	JD.com	JD	8.2%
3	Alibaba	BABA	8.1%
4	NetEase	NTES	6.5%
5	Baidu	BIDU	6.3%
6	Kanzhun	BZ	3.9%
7	Maase	MAAS	3.9%
8	Vipshop	VIPS	3.8%
9	Full Truck Alliance	YMM	3.8%
10	H World Group	HTHT	3.8%

The top 10 make up about 57.97% of the fund.

So even though PGJ owns around 70 stocks, its actual performance still depends heavily on a relatively small group of larger names.

HXC goes through quarterly reconstitution and rebalancing.

Reconstitution decides which companies enter or leave the index. Rebalancing adjusts how much weight each stock gets.

 

Comparing the April 30 holdings with the portfolio after the June quarterly reset, the main new additions in Q2 were:

●  Maase

●  MMTec

●  Julong Holding

●  Next Technology Holding

Some of the names that disappeared from the portfolio included:

●  LZ Technology

●  Jiayin Group

●  X Financial

●  UP Fintech / Tiger Brokers

●  Texxon Holding

●  Here Group

 

Among the four new Q2 additions, MAAS was by far the most significant.

By the end of July, PGJ held around 220,000 shares of MAAS, worth roughly $3.4 million, giving it a 3.89% portfolio weight and making it the fund’s seventh-largest holding.

That’s notable because companies outside the top five are capped at 4% during rebalancing.

So MAAS was added at almost the maximum weight allowed for that group.

MAAS is a Chinese AI company in the middle of a business transformation. Its current focus includes enterprise AI solutions and AI computing infrastructure, supported by its own LLM.

PGJ also isn’t the only ETF holding MAAS.

Recent fund holdings show MAAS appearing in portfolios including the National Security Emerging Markets Index ETF, the Northern Trust Morningstar Emerging Markets Factor Tilt ETF, and the Nasdaq Composite Tracking Stock.

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And here comes my second YOLO:

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I've been looking into $MAAS recently, and I think the company is at an interesting inflection point.

The main reason I'm paying attention isn't simply the "AI" label. It's the fact that MAAS appears to be repositioning the business around AI infrastructure, computing, large models, intelligent hardware and embodied AI.

The Huazhi Future transaction was a major part of that transformation. More recently, $MAAS announced the sale of its 49% stake in Laixi Intelligent for $17 million, saying it plans to focus more resources on AI infrastructure, distributed computing, large models, intelligent hardware and industrial AI.

That makes me wonder whether we're looking at the early stages of a broader business transformation rather than just another company adding "AI" to its investor presentation.

The bull case:

• Exposure to several fast-growing AI segments rather than a single product
• A potentially interesting combination of AI infrastructure + intelligent hardware + embodied AI
• Management appears to be actively reallocating capital toward the new strategy
• If the new businesses can actually generate meaningful revenue, the current market perception could change significantly

But there are some obvious red flags.

This is still a microcap, and the dilution/share count is something investors absolutely need to pay attention to. The company also has to prove that these AI initiatives can become real businesses rather than just a collection of ambitious announcements.

Execution is probably the biggest question here.

So I'm not saying MAAS is the "next Nvidia" or that anyone should blindly buy it.

I'm curious what other investors think:

Is MAAS an interesting early-stage AI turnaround, or are the risks simply too high for a microcap like this?

Would especially like to hear from people who have looked at the latest SEC filings and the Huazhi Future transaction. What am I missing?

If the biggest debate during the most aggressive phase of the AI rally over the past two years was “Who can build the most powerful model?”, then the U.S. stock market seems to be asking a different question now:

Who can actually turn AI’s insatiable demand for computing power into revenue?

CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) just delivered a pretty compelling answer.

The company reported $2.58 billion in second-quarter revenue, up 112% year over year, while its revenue backlog reached $104.2 billion, up 246%. Even more striking, CoreWeave secured more than $25 billion in additional customer commitments during the quarter. Following the earnings release, $CRWV shares surged as much as 23%.

But what really got the market excited may not have been the doubling of revenue. It was the orders.

AI’s biggest bottleneck is increasingly shifting from “Do we have the models?” to “Do we have enough compute?”

Models can become cheaper. API access can become more widespread. But when Meta, Anthropic and an expanding list of enterprises begin deploying AI at scale, the GPUs, data centers, power capacity and computing infrastructure they need simply do not appear out of thin air.

That is why CoreWeave’s latest earnings report matters. It is telling the market that AI compute is no longer just a concept or an investment narrative—it is infrastructure that enterprises are willing to lock in years in advance.

And that may explain why NBIS has also been attracting significant investor attention recently.

The market is beginning to revalue the entire “AI Compute Infrastructure” sector.

And this is where things get interesting.

As the Market Chases Compute Orders, $MAAS Has Its First Ticket to the Game

MAAS (NASDAQ: MAAS) is, of course, nowhere near CoreWeave’s scale.

But zoom in a little, and there is a subtle but important change taking place at the company:

$MAAS is beginning to move from “telling an AI story” to actually delivering AI orders.

On August 11, MAAS subsidiary Huazhi Future completed delivery of an RMB 1.65 million AI computing services contract. Five AI computing nodes passed customer acceptance, and, more importantly, the full payment had already been received.

RMB 1.65 million is hardly a game-changing number.

But for a company still in the early stages of building its AI infrastructure business, what matters more are the three words that came after it:

Delivered. Accepted. Paid.

That means AI is beginning to move beyond “compute infrastructure” on a PowerPoint slide and into actual commercial activity that can be reflected on the balance sheet.

And perhaps this is the biggest lesson CoreWeave is offering the market:

AI infrastructure will ultimately be judged not by the story, but by the conversion of demand into orders and revenue.

What makes MAAS even more interesting is that it is not content with simply selling computing power.

If MAAS were only an AI server and computing-node provider, its upside story would be relatively limited. But the company’s recent moves suggest that it is expanding both upstream and downstream.

On one side is computing infrastructure.

On the other is its own large language model, Lingyanmiaoyu.

In July, MAAS officially opened Lingyanmiaoyu to consumers. More importantly, the model did not stop at being “just another chatbot.” It quickly began moving into enterprise applications.

On July 21, Huazhi Future signed an enterprise AI solutions development agreement with Zhongchuang Liankong, with a contract value exceeding RMB 10 million. The project covers model customization, algorithm optimization, data engineering, application development, system integration and private deployment.

Put those two developments together, and the logic becomes clear:

Compute → Model → Enterprise Applications.

That is arguably more interesting than simply launching another large language model.

Because AI commercialization has never really been about the moment a model goes live. The real monetization begins when that model enters enterprise workflows, production systems and real-world business operations.

And this is where MAAS and CoreWeave are worth viewing through the same lens.

Of course, the two companies are nowhere near the same scale today.

CoreWeave already has more than $100 billion in backlog, while MAAS remains in the early stages of commercialization.

But they are responding to the same broader industry trend:

AI demand is increasingly moving downstream from the software layer into the infrastructure layer.

CoreWeave has demonstrated that large-scale demand for compute is real.

NBIS is showing that the capital markets are willing to assign a significant valuation premium to that growth.

And what $MAAS needs to prove now is something different:

Can a smaller, early-stage company ride the same industry trend and gradually turn compute, models and enterprise AI services into actual revenue?

That is far more interesting than simply saying “$MAAS is an AI company.”

The former is a growth path that still needs to be validated. The latter is merely a label.

What the Market Should Really Be Waiting For May Not Be the Next MOU

$MAAS is also exploring a much bigger opportunity.

In late July, Huazhi Future signed an MOU with Kazakhstan’s KT-Telecom to explore the development of an AI data center, potentially utilizing its “Stars Distributed Intelligent Computing” architecture.

The project remains at the MOU stage, so there is no reason to treat it as booked revenue.

But it does indicate something important:

MAAS is not simply pursuing a handful of AI server projects. It appears to be trying to turn “compute infrastructure + models + applications” into a replicable system.

The company also sold a 49% stake in Laixi Intelligent in July for $17 million, further reallocating resources away from non-core businesses and toward AI infrastructure and related operations.

So perhaps the right question to ask about MAAS today is not:

“Is it the next CRWV?”

That question is largely meaningless.

A much more interesting question is:

If AI infrastructure becomes the next sector to undergo sustained re-rating in the U.S. stock market, could a small company that already has AI compute orders, its own LLM, early enterprise AI projects and an expanding computing infrastructure business eventually earn its own valuation window?

The answer will take time to prove.

After all, a RMB 1.65 million order and an enterprise project worth more than RMB 10 million are only the beginning. And an MOU is not revenue.

But this is often how market narratives begin.

$CRWV is showing the market that AI compute demand can reach the $100 billion scale.

$MAAS now has to prove that it can take that enormous industry demand and turn it, one order at a time, into its own revenue—starting with a RMB 1.65 million contract.

If it succeeds, investors may no longer need to ask whether MAAS has an AI story.

The question could become much more direct:

 

How much should an AI infrastructure company with real, paying compute customers actually be worth?

China’s AI startup ecosystem is shifting from a singular focus on "catching up in model performance" to exploring diversified pathways. A new wave of entrepreneurs with varied backgrounds is carving out distinct trajectories in open ecosystems, AGI, multimodal products, and enterprise applications.

Which of them is your choice?

1. DeepSeek: Pursuing AGI with a Quantitative Mindset

• Founder: Liang Wenfeng (Founder of High-Flyer Quant). Backed by proprietary computing power and steady cash flow, the company eschews short-term commercialization.
• Core Objective: To increase the probability of achieving AGI, rather than becoming the largest AI company.
• Technical Roadmap: Reasoning → Agent → Continuous Learning → Self-Improvement. The company remains disciplined, avoiding non-core trends like video generation.
• Organizational Philosophy: An anti-KPI culture that emphasizes research freedom and long-termism; committed to open source, believing the true moat lies in system engineering capabilities rather than model weights alone.
• Industry Insight: Demonstrates that under compute constraints, extreme algorithmic efficiency is a viable survival strategy.

2. Moonshot AI: From Viral App to Global Open Ecosystem

• Founder: Yang Zhilin (Tsinghua/CMU alumnus), a quintessential "AI-native" prodigy entrepreneur.
• Strategic Pivot: Following the viral success of Kimi and subsequent competitive pressure, the company deliberately scaled back short-term commercial expectations to refocus on model research and an open-weight strategy.
• Latest Achievement: Released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model that rivals top-tier U.S. models in coding and agentic tasks, successfully penetrating the global developer community.
• Positioning: Validates the potential for independent Chinese labs to compete at the global frontier.

3. Zhipu AI: A Blueprint for Commercializing Academic Labs

• Background: Incubated from Tsinghua University’s Knowledge Engineering Lab, driven by Professor Tang Jie’s team.
• Model: Organically evolved from a research project into a company, blending academic depth with commercial expansion (with CEO Zhang Peng overseeing operations).
• Milestone: Listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2026, becoming one of China’s first foundational model companies to enter the public capital markets.
• Significance: Pioneers a "Chinese-style" pathway for transforming elite university AI labs into scalable tech enterprises.

4. MiniMax: Dual Focus on Models and Global Consumer Products

• Founder: Yan Junjie (Former VP at SenseTime), a firm believer in Scaling Laws.
• Strategy: A dual-engine approach of "Model Company + Product Company," with early investments in multimodality (text, voice, video, and AI characters).
• Commercialization: Listed on the HKEX in January 2026; achieved 159% revenue growth in 2025, with over 70% derived from overseas markets.
• Breakthrough: First to validate global consumers' willingness to pay for Chinese AI products.

5. MAAS: Deepening Enterprise-Level Deployment

• CTO: Dr. Li Zhifeng (Ph.D. in Physics), focused on translating theoretical research into deployable engineering systems.
• Positioning: Bridging the "last mile" gap for integrating large models into enterprise production environments.
• Technology: Proprietary Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture designed to balance capability, efficiency, and deployment costs.
• Value Proposition: Prioritizes data security, stability, and business system integration over benchmark chasing, representing a pragmatic path for industrial AI.