[News] Chinese AI Models Reportedly Hit ~15% Global Share in Nov. 2025, Fueled by DeepSeek Open-Source Push
The use of generative AI developed by Chinese companies is expanding. After DeepSeek shocked the world a year ago, the country’s open-source models have steadily gained momentum. According to Nikkei, generative AI developed by Chinese companies account for about 15% of global market share in November 2025, a sharp rise from around 1% a year earlier.
Following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, the development of generative AI has been driven largely by U.S. companies, while the report notes that the flagship models of U.S. firms are predominantly closed-source, offering AI capabilities on a usage-based, pay-per-use basis.
By contrast, as the report highlights, Chinese companies have been rolling out open-source models in rapid succession. Users can freely download these models, enabling the development of AI systems for a wide range of applications at lower cost.
China’s AI ecosystem is centered on DeepSeek and Alibaba Group’s Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen). R1, released by DeepSeek in January 2025, stunned the world by achieving high performance at low cost. Qwen has also been upgraded frequently. The report adds that around 40% of AI models developed by Chinese companies are used for advanced tasks, such as programming and design.
Notably, according to South China Morning Post, Alibaba Cloud’s flagship Qwen model family had surpassed 700 million downloads by January 2026 on the developer platform Hugging Face, making it the world’s most widely used open-source AI system. The report adds that Qwen’s momentum stems from Alibaba Cloud’s strategy of open-sourcing a broad lineup of models, from lightweight versions with 600 million parameters to large models with tens of billions of parameters.
Meanwhile, DeepSeek may be preparing a new model. As Commercial Times, points out, around the one-year anniversary of the Chinese AI startup’s release of its R1 reasoning model, a new project named “MODEL1” quietly appeared in the open-source community.
Nikkei’s “AI Model Ratings,” which assess the performance of leading models in Japanese, show that DeepSeek’s model released in December ranked ninth out of 92 models. The report points out that DeepSeek placed first among open-source models, followed by Alibaba Group, and outperformed the open-source models from Google and OpenAI in terms of performance.
These Chinese AI models have been gaining traction overseas. Nikkei notes that six of the top 10 models developed by Japanese companies, including those from emerging player ABEJA, are built on DeepSeek and Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen). The report adds that Japan’s National Institute of Informatics (NII) has also adopted Qwen to organize training data for its domestic AI development initiative, LLM-jp.
Read more
- [News] China’s Open-Source AI Push Expands After DeepSeek, as Baidu and Huawei Launch New Models
- DeepSeek’s Low-Cost AI Model to Spur Demand for Optical Communication, with Optical Transceiver Shipments Projected to Grow by 56.5% in 2025, Says TrendForce
(Photo credit: DeepSeek on X)
Please note that this article cites information from Nikkei, South China Morning Post, and, Commercial Times.
