Bank forecasts a sharp revenue surge after Chinese AI models slash costs, boost capabilities and capture global token share
rapidly advancing capabilitiesfrom players like DeepSeek and MiniMax have prompted Goldman Sachs to raise its run-rate revenue forecast for China’s artificial intelligence model market by 30 per cent to US$13 billion.
mainland Chinese AI modelsfrom US$10 billion, citing aggressive price cuts, technical breakthroughs and accelerating corporate adoption.
Goldman Sachs lifted projected year-end ARRs of Hong Kong-listed Zhipu AI and MiniMax to US$2.5 billion and US$1 billion, respectively.
“We expect competition for the best performance-to-price balance to intensify among Chinese AI models,” the report said, noting that recent releases from domestic pioneers had reached new frontiers in performance per dollar.
The heightened competition followed MiniMax’s launch last Friday of its H3 model under an open-weight approach. The multi-modal system – capable of processing text, image, video, audio and music – was priced at just 30 to 50 per cent of incumbent market levels, according to Goldman Sachs.
On the same day, DeepSeek officially launched application programming interface (API) access for its V4 Flash model, achieving front-end coding capabilities that rival Zhipu’s flagship GLM-5.2.
According to Arena AI’s latest leaderboard, GLM-5.2 ranks seventh in front-end coding globally, while DeepSeek V4 Flash closely follows in eighth place.