Six Chinese AI Firms Earn a Tenth of Two US Ones
Epoch AI compares annualised revenue and finds a gap that usage data alone does not reveal.
Epoch AI’s September estimate, reported by Nikkei on 9 November 2026, puts combined annual revenue for six Chinese AI companies at about $11 billion against $105 billion for OpenAI and Anthropic, a ratio of roughly one to ten. The Chinese figure includes cloud-related revenue at Alibaba and ByteDance, and ByteDance alone accounts for about $4 billion. Zhipu and MiniMax, listed in Hong Kong since January, have fallen 80% to 90% from their peaks and both posted first-half losses. The contrast with routing data is the story: Chinese models win volume on price, and lose on revenue per token.