Goldman Sachs dropped a comprehensive report on Friday dissecting the competitive positioning of China’s AI large language model industry, and the takeaway is pretty clear: Chinese AI companies are building models that rival their American counterparts while charging a fraction of the price.
The report, led by analyst Ronald Keung and titled “Who Will Be the Long-Term Winner in China’s AI Large Model Industry?,” introduces a novel three-dimensional framework evaluating companies across pricing power, cost advantages, and financial strength.
The competitive landscape, mapped
Goldman’s framework identifies two clear leaders in different domains. Zhipu and DeepSeek currently dominate in foundational text models, while ByteDance has pulled ahead as the frontrunner in multimodal and video generation capabilities.
Here’s the thing about pricing. Chinese high-end models are running at roughly $1 per million tokens, compared to $4-8 for their US equivalents. That’s 10-25% of what American companies charge. At the low end, Chinese models go as cheap as $0.06-0.20 per million tokens.
