Rhodium Group Estimates OpenAI and Anthropic Revenue Outpaces Chinese AI Models Tenfold

BEIJING — China’s artificial intelligence models are experiencing rapid adoption, but this growth has not yet translated into significant revenue, prompting scrutiny of company valuations.

According to estimates from U.S.-based research firm Rhodium Group, all Chinese AI models combined generate only about 10% of the revenue reported for OpenAI and Anthropic. The analysis relies on annual recurring revenue (ARR), a metric that multiplies recent monthly figures by 12 to gauge rapid growth.

DeepSeek reported the lowest ARR among major Chinese AI companies at $500 million, followed by MiniMax at $800 million and Moonshot at $1 billion. Z.ai disclosed to investors on Wednesday that its latest ARR reached $1.8 billion, as reported by CNBC.

Despite ByteDance’s $4 billion and Alibaba’s $2.4 billion, these figures fall significantly short of the $40 billion generated by OpenAI alone and the $65 billion for Anthropic, Rhodium noted.

Critically, the low revenue does not align with how investors are valuing these Chinese startups. “Valuations relative to revenue appear exorbitant for Moonshot and DeepSeek at present,” the Rhodium report stated, citing estimated ratios of 50x and 163x, respectively. This compares to 34x for OpenAI and 21x for Anthropic.

Z.ai forecast

The Rhodium analysis is limited to the latest available figures from this summer, and Chinese AI model usage has skyrocketed from low levels earlier in the year. Z.ai now expects its ARR to reach $3 billion by year-end, up from a previous forecast of $2.4 billion.

Rhodium also highlighted that Chinese AI labs are exploring ways to capture more revenue from third parties providing access to the models. Because these models are open-source, anyone with capable hardware can download and run them independently of the developer.

Conversely, U.S. models remain mostly closed, and the cost per task for leading AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic is far higher than that of Chinese models, according to AI-comparison firm Artificial Analysis.

“The financing gap means it will be far more difficult for Chinese frontier AI labs to scale sustainably,” Logan Wright, partner at Rhodium Group and co-author of the report with research analyst Endeavour Tian, said in a statement to CNBC. “They will be heavily dependent upon a favorable climate in the equity market—historically that’s not an easy bet in China. Government funding has been helpful on the hardware side of the buildout of compute capacity, but similarly will probably balk at direct funding for the frontier labs.”

Rhodium estimated that more than 60% of equity investment in Chinese AI chips and servers came from state-affiliated sources.

This has been a volatile year for Chinese AI companies that have listed.

Z.ai shares rose more than 5% in Thursday morning trading, recovering from a decline earlier this week following news of its second major fundraise in two months. The Hong Kong-traded stock has tumbled to levels seen this spring after briefly more than tripling in price over the summer.

Shares of rival Minimax have struggled in recent months to hold above their IPO-day gains, after seeing shares spike in the spring.

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