Goldman Sachs Deep Dive Report: Who Will Become the Long-Term Winners in China's AI Large Model Industry?
Goldman Sachs Report: Who Will Be the Long-Term Winners in China's AI Large Model Industry?
China's AI large model sector is at a historic inflection point. Goldman Sachs argues that the intelligence of Chinese open-source/open-weight models is approaching top global proprietary models. Rapid adoption by domestic enterprises and global SMEs is creating a data flywheel effect that will further drive model iteration. The evolution is summarized as moving from "DeepSeek's cost-efficiency moment last year to GLM's model-intelligence moment this year."
Chinese models achieve near-state-of-the-art performance at significantly lower cost, primarily due to architectural innovations like Mixture of Experts (MoE) and higher parameter efficiency. Models like DeepSeek V4 Pro (1.6T params), GLM5.2 (0.7T), and MiniMax M3 (0.4T) are much smaller than global leaders. Recent advancements in coding capability are attributed to better data curation and RLHF. Landmarks like Meituan's LongCat 2.0, trained fully on domestic AI chips, demonstrate progress in hardware stack independence.
The market is forming a "two-tiered structure." The high-end tier (e.g., GLM5.2, Alibaba's Qwen3.7 Max) prices around $1 per million tokens, about 10-25% of US top models, with estimated inference gross margins of 10-20%. The low-end tier (priced as low as $0.06-$0.2 per million tokens) targets price-sensitive global SMEs and individuals. MiniMax derives 60-70% of revenue overseas. Goldman forecasts China's AI model API/subscription revenue to grow from an estimated RMB 35bn in 2026 to RMB 879bn by 2030.
Most Chinese players adopt open-source/open-weight strategies for deployment flexibility and community feedback, though this limits monetization as deployments on third-party platforms (e.g., Alibaba Cloud) may not generate direct revenue. A shift towards "open-weight + community license" models with revenue-sharing agreements (like MiniMax's approach) could improve unit economics.
International expansion, particularly in non-US markets, is the key growth driver. The global enterprise AI paradigm is shifting from "token maximization" to "ROI prioritization." Chinese models are already hosted on major global platforms like AWS Bedrock and are under consideration for integration into Microsoft Copilot.
Using a competitive framework based on pricing power, cost advantage, and financial strength, Goldman identifies the strongest players: In foundational text models, Zhipu AI (initiated coverage) and DeepSeek lead. In multimodal/video generation, ByteDance's Seed is the frontrunner, with Kuaishou's Kling and MiniMax's Hailuo also well-positioned. Goldman maintains a Buy rating on MiniMax, citing its attractive valuation.
链捕手07/10 14:20
