The labs give their models away, and cloud providers resell access without paying them.
US research firm Rhodium Group estimates in a report on China's AI financing that the model businesses of seven of the country's biggest AI developers bring in about $10.7 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR) combined. That is roughly a tenth of the more than $100 billion reported for OpenAI and Anthropic together, with OpenAI at $40 billion in August and Anthropic at $65 billion in July.
ARR annualizes a company's latest monthly revenue rather than counting a completed year, and the figures here are dated anywhere from March to August. Rhodium calls it a highly imperfect way to add up revenue, though a common one for fast-growing firms.
Most of the $10.7 billion comes from two platform companies, ByteDance at $4 billion and Alibaba at $2.4 billion. The labs themselves are far smaller: Z.ai's API business stood at $1.6 billion in August, Moonshot AI at $1 billion, MiniMax at $800 million and DeepSeek at $500 million.
Releasing open weights has limited what the labs can earn, Rhodium says. A cloud provider that deploys one of their models and sells API access to it owes the lab nothing. That may be changing: Rhodium notes Moonshot and Alibaba pushing for revenue-sharing deals with big users of their models. Reuters reported last month that Moonshot is in talks with Microsoft, Amazon and Google over a share that could reach 30%.
Rhodium doubts such deals would add much. A share paid by a cloud provider inside China only moves existing revenue from one firm to another. Money from abroad would deepen a reliance on foreign demand that is already heavy: more than half of Moonshot's revenue has come from overseas users since the end of 2025.
Relative to revenue, Moonshot and DeepSeek look “exorbitant,” Rhodium says, though the Chinese labs are still valued far below OpenAI and Anthropic in absolute terms. It puts DeepSeek at 163 times its ARR, Moonshot at 50 times and Z.ai at 46 times, against 34 times for OpenAI and 21 times for Anthropic. Moonshot's reported valuation reached $50 billion in August, up from $4 billion at the end of 2025; the round behind it has not closed. The company has also filed confidentially for a Hong Kong listing.
Hong Kong-listed Z.ai and MiniMax reported first-half revenue up 400% and 283% year on year. Macquarie's Ellie Jiang told the Alibaba-owned South China Morning Post last week that computing costs could keep both loss-making through 2030, and that investors have accepted the losses while adoption is early.