Analysis: To Reduce Costs, Overseas Developers Are Turning to Chinese AI Models like DeepSeek

Odaily Planet Daily News As the cost of AI usage continues to rise, more and more overseas startups and developers are adopting Chinese AI models such as DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI to reduce inference costs. Data shows that DeepSeek's share of AI traffic on the cloud platform Vercel has risen from less than 1% in May this year to 17%. Meanwhile, the AI model aggregation platform OpenRouter stated that DeepSeek's usage doubled in the first half of 2026, making it the platform's most popular model. It also pointed out that the token usage share of Chinese open-source models, including those from Xiaomi, MiniMax, and Tencent, has been increasing, while the shares of Google and OpenAI have declined. (Bloomberg)