Chinese AI models are doing the work but not getting paid for it, Dimension Capital tells investors

Chinese AI labs have quietly become the engine behind a huge share of Western AI workloads. The money, though, stays in America.

That’s the core finding from Dimension Capital, which shared its analysis with limited partners after a research trip to Beijing and Shanghai. The venture firm, which closed an $800 million fund in July 2026, found that open-weight models built by Chinese teams now account for more than 60% of token usage on platforms like OpenRouter, up from essentially nothing not long ago.

The work flows east, the dollars stay west

The pattern Dimension describes is a kind of lopsided symbiosis. US frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic develop leading proprietary models. Chinese teams, including DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen, and ByteDance’s Doubao, produce open-weight alternatives that American application companies then refine and deploy. Eight of the top 10 models on OpenRouter now originate from Chinese labs, capturing more than 25% of total token volume on the platform.

But token volume is not revenue. The inference providers actually collecting payments from developers and enterprises are overwhelmingly American: companies like Fireworks and Baseten. Chinese model builders, despite powering a massive share of usage, see only a sliver of the financial return.