On December 30, 2021, SenseTime Group, then one of China’s best-known artificial-intelligence companies and its largest computer-vision software provider, began trading on the Main Board of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong under stock code 0020. The company, co-founded and led by Dr. Xu Li, marked the moment with simultaneous listing ceremonies in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
The listing was unusual. Just before the planned debut, the US Treasury placed SenseTime on its list of “Chinese military-industrial complex companies,” citing the role of its facial-recognition technology in surveillance of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang. SenseTime postponed the offering, then relaunched it days later with US investors excluded from the deal. It still raised roughly US$740 million.
SenseTime’s IPO captured several threads of the period at once: the rise of a large Chinese computer-vision industry, the controversy over AI-powered surveillance, and the way US-China tensions and sanctions were beginning to reshape how AI companies could raise capital and access markets.