China’s AI revenue projected to reach US$13b on breakthroughs, adoption: Goldman Sachs

China's artificial intelligence model market revenue is expected to reach US$13 billion, according to Goldman Sachs. The US investment bank has raised its revenue forecast by 30 per cent, citing breakthroughs in technology, adoption by corporations, and aggressive price cuts. Goldman Sachs expects competition among Chinese AI models to intensify due to their performance-to-price balance.

MiniMax's H3 model, launched last Friday, is priced at 30 to 50 per cent of incumbent market levels. DeepSeek has also released its V4 Flash model, which offers front-end coding capabilities that rival Zhipu's flagship GLM-5.2. Alibaba Group Holding has launched its 2.4-trillion-parameter Qwen3.8 Max model, which ranks fourth in front-end coding globally.

Chinese open-weight models currently command nearly 70 per cent of global token consumption on developer platforms like OpenRouter. Tencent Holdings' WorkBuddy and ByteDance's TRAE have captured significant market shares in the workspace agentic tools. Chinese developers are expected to shift towards "community licences" for open-weight models, with API pricing and gross margins expected to remain under pressure through the second half of the year.

However, Goldman Sachs warns of impending geopolitical constraints, with reports of Chinese authorities considering restrictions on foreign downloads of model weights and overseas transfers of training data.