The core ARR of China's open-source large models is approximately 6-8 billion USD

Robonomics author FD published the China Open-Source LLM Tracker on September 1, 2026, stating that the total ARR of China's open-source large models is approximately $10-15 billion, with core LLM revenue around $6-8 billion after excluding ByteDance / Seedance. Growth has not relied on price wars; after DeepSeek raised prices by about 3-12 times, usage still increased, and the average price of the Zhipu API rose by 101% while token usage exceeded 40 times within the year. The best estimate for overseas revenue is approximately $2 billion.

Zhipu MaaS ARR increased from about $250 million in March to an annualized monthly rate of about $1.6 billion in August, with a weekly annualized rate of $2 billion. August revenue has already surpassed its API revenue for the first half of the year; the API gross margin is 24.6%, and inference costs per token decreased by 80%. MiniMax ARR rose from about $100 million in December 2025 to over $800 million in annualized weekly revenue by August 2026, with B2B accounting for about 80%. Kimi ARR increased from about $100 million in March to about $300 million by mid-June. DeepSeek's revenue from January to July was approximately $70 million, with the latest ARR estimated at about $1.2 billion.

ByteDance's annualized AI revenue is approximately $4 billion, of which Seedance accounts for about $2 billion.