Chinese Models Priced Up as Volume Arrived

Zhipu raised API prices three times this year and usage still grew more than fortyfold.

Menlo Ventures’ 2026 enterprise AI report, reported on 12 November 2026, puts global enterprise AI spending at $176.8 billion this year, with 89% of US enterprise open-model spending going to Chinese developers: Kimi at 61%, DeepSeek 15% and Zhipu 11%. The countervailing figure is that open models rose from 11% to 19% of enterprise token consumption while their share of spending fell from 6% to 4%. Chinese vendors have responded by raising prices and shifting to subscriptions: Zhipu lifted API prices three times in 2026, MiniMax doubled its API rates and Kimi K3 priced more than three times its predecessor. Zhipu’s first-half revenue reached 954 million yuan, up 399.7%, with API gross margin turning positive from -0.4% to 24.6% as unit inference cost fell about 80%. One number needs to travel with that: overall gross margin fell from 50% to 26.4% as low-margin API revenue grew from 15.2% to 86.5% of the mix, and the adjusted net loss widened 12.1% to 1.964 billion yuan.