China's AI Industry Landscape: Strength Coordinates of Hundred-Billion-Yuan AI Companies and Major Internet Giants
In 2026, China's AI industry is advancing from the "Hundred-Model Battle" to a new stage of concentrated competition among leading players. Represented by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Zhipu AI and MiniMax, AI companies valued at hundreds of billions of yuan are constantly setting new benchmarks in the capital market and technology rankings, while internet giants including Tencent, ByteDance, Alibaba and Baidu are making full-scale bets on AI. The intertwined development of these 8 core players forms the most representative strength landscape of China's AI industry in 2026.
Domestic AI "Four Young Titans": Young Stewards of Hundred-Billion-Yuan Business Empires
1. DeepSeek (Liang Wenfeng): The Rise of the World's Richest AI Model Founder
Person in charge: Founder Liang Wenfeng, 41 years old, master's degree graduate of Zhejiang University.
Liang Wenfeng was once the top scorer in the college entrance examination in Zhanjiang, and later founded High-Flyer Quant, a giant quantitative investment firm. He introduced the statistical thinking in quantitative trading into large model training: the training cost of DeepSeek-V3 is only 5.576 million US dollars, and the reasoning cost is reduced to about one tenth of the industry average. For a long time, DeepSeek has adhered to zero external equity financing, and all R&D and computing power procurement are covered by the profits of its parent company High-Flyer Quant. However, in 2026, the cost of reasoning computing power has risen exponentially, and the profit of a quantitative company alone can no longer support the capital burning speed of the ten-thousand-card cluster.
From the end of May to June 2026, DeepSeek completed its first round of external financing since its establishment, raising about 74 billion US dollars (about 500 billion yuan), with a post-investment valuation of 520 billion US dollars (about 3.5 trillion yuan). The list of investors is extremely strong: Liang Wenfeng personally contributed about 200 billion yuan (about 30 billion US dollars) as the largest single investor; Tencent contributed 100 billion yuan; the CATL system contributed 50 billion yuan; JD.com, NetEase and IDG Capital each contributed 30 billion yuan. Only a few weeks after the first round of financing was closed, DeepSeek has quietly started negotiations for a new round of financing, with a pre-investment valuation of about 710 billion US dollars (about 4.8 trillion yuan), an increase of about 37% compared with the post-investment valuation of the first round. Within three months, the valuation rose from the rumored 100 billion US dollars to 520 billion, then to 710 billion, a sevenfold increase.
With the acceleration of capital operations, the founder's wealth has risen accordingly. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Liang Wenfeng's personal net worth has soared from about 16.7 billion US dollars to 360 billion US dollars (about 2.44 trillion yuan), making him the world's richest founder of AI models. At the same time, DeepSeek has been in close contact with accounting firms and investment banks to prepare for an IPO, striving to complete the preparation of financial reports before the end of 2026, and targeting a formal listing on China's capital market in 2027. DeepSeek's annualized revenue has reached 400 million to 500 million US dollars, mainly from enterprises and developers calling the model through APIs, and the gross profit margin of V4 API exceeds 50%. The model has been adopted by more than 200,000 enterprises around the world.
2. Moonshot AI (Yang Zhilin): Three Jumps in ARR, Sprinting to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange
Person in charge: Founder Yang Zhilin, 34 years old, undergraduate of Tsinghua University, Ph.D. of Carnegie Mellon University.
Yang Zhilin is the youngest of the four, and he once participated in the proposal of deep learning architectures such as Transformer-XL and XLNet. In 2023, he returned to China to found Moonshot AI, and took long context as the core technical direction of Kimi.
In July this year, Moonshot AI officially released the Kimi K3 model, with a total parameter scale of 2.8 trillion and 104 billion activated parameters, making it the world's first open source model to reach the 3 trillion parameter level. Based on the mixture-of-experts architecture, the model activates only 16 experts for each Token among 896 routing experts.
In terms of valuation, starting from about 4.3 billion US dollars at the end of 2025, Moonshot AI completed a new round of 2 billion US dollars financing in May 2026, and its post-investment valuation exceeded 20 billion US dollars. According to a report by *LatePost* on September 2, Moonshot AI has submitted its A1 document to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in confidential form this week, officially launching the Hong Kong stock IPO process; at the same time, the company is advancing a new round of financing with a pre-investment valuation of about 500 billion US dollars, which is regarded by the market as the last round before the IPO. A spokesperson for Moonshot AI responded: "We will not comment on market rumors, and there is no information that can be disclosed at present."
In terms of commercialization, the company's ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) exceeded 300 million US dollars in mid-June — it exceeded 100 million US dollars in March, reached 200 million US dollars in April, completing three jumps in three months. API revenue accounts for more than 70% of the total revenue, and overseas paying users have increased by 4 times. As of June 2026, Kimi's enterprise customers have exceeded 120,000, and paying users in the fields of finance, law and scientific research account for more than 60%. Yang Zhilin holds 51.83% of the equity, and his personal net worth exceeds 110 billion yuan.
3. Zhipu AI (Tang Jie: The "Height-Reaching Plan" for AGI of a Tsinghua Professor
Person in charge: Founder Tang Jie, 49 years old, professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University.
On January 8, 2026, Zhipu AI was listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at an issue price of 116.2 Hong Kong dollars, with a market value of over 57 billion Hong Kong dollars on the first day. On June 17, 2026, Zhipu AI released and open sourced the new generation of flagship large model GLM-5.2, focusing on "long-horizon tasks" — enabling AI to no longer only do instant question and answer, but to work continuously for several hours like humans, and independently complete a complete large-scale engineering project. The model scored 51 points on the Artificial Analysis comprehensive ranking, ranking as the SOTA of open source models, and together with Anthropic and OpenAI formed the new "Three Leading Players" pattern of the world's top models. On June 22, catalyzed by factors such as the release of GLM-5.2 and the "dialogue across the air" between founder Tang Jie and Elon Musk, Zhipu AI's stock price once rose to 2980 Hong Kong dollars during the session, and its total market value stood at 1.27 trillion Hong Kong dollars. However, later due to factors such as massive share lifting, the stock price corrected significantly from its historical high of 1993 Hong Kong dollars. On June 1, Zhipu AI announced that it plans to apply for listing on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, with a planned fundraising of 150 billion yuan. In an internal letter in July 2026, Tang Jie put forward the "Height-Reaching Plan", announcing that the company will focus on investing in AGI basic research in the next two years, and will not pursue short-term application monetization.
4. MiniMax (Yan Junjie): Pioneer of Multimodal Applications
Person in charge: Founder Yan Junjie.
MiniMax takes multimodal applications as a breakthrough, and was founded in Shanghai in early 2022 by Yan Junjie, former vice president and deputy director of the research institute of SenseTime. The company independently developed a family of multimodal models covering text, voice, image, video and music.
On January 9, 2026, MiniMax was listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at a price of 165 Hong Kong dollars per share. On the first day of listing, its stock price soared by about 109%, and its market value exceeded 100 billion Hong Kong dollars. On March 18, its stock price hit 1330 Hong Kong dollars, once ranking as the "highest-priced stock on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange". As of the close on May 29, the stock price was still at 840 Hong Kong dollars, with a cumulative increase of over 400% compared to the issue price, and its market value stabilized at 263.5 billion Hong Kong dollars (about 240 billion yuan). On May 29, MiniMax signed a tutoring agreement with CITIC Securities, officially launching the A-share IPO process, striving for dual "A+H" listing. For the whole year of 2025, the company achieved a total revenue of 79.038 million US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 158.9%, and more than 70% of its revenue came from the international market. The company has about 300 million global users, and has served more than one million global enterprise and developer customers. However, affected by factors such as share lifting, the company's stock price once fell from 1330 Hong Kong dollars to 297 Hong Kong dollars, a drop of up to 77%, reflecting the fierce divergence of the secondary market on AI valuation.
Internet Giants: Strategic Bets Led by Top Executives
Internet giants have abundant cash flow and massive application scenarios, but they are faced with tests of organizational coordination and strategic determination.
1. Tencent (Ma Huateng): "Double Helix" and the Rapid Advancement of Hunyuan
Person in charge: Chairman of the Board and CEO Ma Huateng, President Liu Chiping.
Tencent emphasizes the "double helix" coordination of models and applications. In the second quarter of 2026, Tencent achieved revenue of 2047.85 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 11%; non-IFRS operating profit was 684.15 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9%. Revenue from fintech and enterprise services was 602.86 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9%. Hunyuan Hy3 completed rapid iteration from the preview version to the official version, and the calling volume one week after launch increased by more than 68 times compared with the previous generation. According to the token consumption of OpenRouter, Hy3 has been ranking among the top three in the world since its launch. Tencent's office AI product WorkBuddy and programming tool CodeBuddy have achieved breakthrough user growth. Greater expectations come from the upcoming Hunyuan Hy4. Tencent revealed that Hy4 is planned to be launched in the near future to further improve model performance and multimodal capabilities.
Tencent's capital expenditure in this quarter reached 527.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 176% and a month-on-month increase of 65%, far exceeding the market expectation of 32.1 billion yuan. Capital expenditure in the first half of the year reached 847.2 billion yuan. Due to the surge in capital expenditure payments, Tencent recorded a negative free cash flow of 138 billion yuan in the second quarter. Ma Huateng said in the financial report that the company is building a new AI-empowered Tencent at three levels: intelligence, application and infrastructure — Tencent's AI narrative is shifting from defense to offense. Its current market value is about 4.1 trillion Hong Kong dollars.
2. ByteDance (Liang Rubo): "Accepting Backwardness" and the Shift to ToB
Person in charge: CEO Liang Rubo, founder Zhang Yiming sets the overall tone.
ByteDance's AI strategy is the most dramatic. At the mid-year all-hands meeting on August 6, 2026, CEO Liang Rubo admitted that Doubao has maintained competitiveness on the C-end, and the video generation model Seedance maintains SOTA (state-of-the-art), but the large language model has been widened in gap by overseas leading models. Founder Zhang Yiming set the tone of "accepting short-term backwardness, insisting on long-term optimization, and not using distillation to speed up training".
ByteDance's response is to strategically shift to ToB. On July 30, ByteDance integrated the Feishu product team and the Doubao team, and merged the Volcano Engine and Feishu commercial team GTM to establish a new "Creativity Service Platform". The daily average Token calling volume of the Doubao large model has exceeded 180 trillion. Seedance 2.0 has an Elo score of 1269 on the Artificial Analysis Video Arena ranking, surpassing Google Veo 3 and OpenAI Sora 2. ByteDance has raised its 2026 AI capital expenditure plan from the initial 160 billion yuan to more than 2000 billion yuan. ByteDance's overall valuation reaches 4 trillion yuan (about 600 billion US dollars), ranking first in the country.
3. Alibaba (Wu Yongming): Token Foundry and Strategic Restructuring
Person in charge: CEO Wu Yongming, Chief Scientist Zhou Jingren.
After Wu Yongming took over as Alibaba's CEO in 2023, he established the strategic core of "user first, AI-driven". In March 2026, Alibaba established the Alibaba Token Hub business group, and on June 8, further established the Token Foundry business unit, which is personally led by Wu Yongming. On August 3, the flagship model Qwen3.8-Max was released, with a total parameter of 2.4 trillion, ranking second only to Claude in the Arena ranking, third in the world in the CodeArena programming arena, and first in the world in the Artificial Analysis Agentic evaluation.
In the first quarter of fiscal year 2027 (as of June 30, 2026), Alibaba's revenue was 2689.53 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9%. Adjusted EBITA was 27.329 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 30%, which was mainly attributed to investment in science and technology. Capital expenditure in this quarter was 676.78 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 75%. The 3-year 3800 billion-yuan AI infrastructure investment plan has accumulated about 1900 billion yuan in investment. Wu Yongming said that according to the current average gross profit of AI products, the cost can be recovered within three years.
In the same period, Alibaba announced a major organizational restructuring: the e-commerce business was integrated into "Alibaba E-Commerce Group"; the Cloud Intelligence Group and the PingTouGe chip business were integrated into "AI Cloud and Computing Power Services"; the AI Model Lab, Qwen 2C Division and Qwen Office business were integrated into "AI Lab and Applications". Under the new structure, the revenue of AI Cloud and Computing Power Services was 484.37 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 45%, and adjusted EBITA was 56.28 billion yuan, a year-on-year surge of 133%; the revenue of AI Lab and Applications was 3.338 billion yuan, with a loss of 138.61 billion yuan. The challenge for Alibaba lies in the loss of core backbones during organizational adjustment, and its programming and video products are temporarily lagging behind ByteDance/Kuaishou. Its current market value is about 2.4 trillion Hong Kong dollars.
4. Baidu (Li Yanhong): The Valuation Dilemma of AI Pioneer
Person in charge: Founder, Chairman and CEO Li Yanhong.
Baidu is the earliest internet giant in China to lay out the AI track. In the second quarter of 2026, Baidu's core new AI business revenue reached 12.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 25%. Among them, intelligent cloud infrastructure contributed 7.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 50%, and GPU cloud revenue increased by 283% year-on-year; its AI application revenue was 2.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 3%, and AI-native marketing service revenue was 2.6 billion yuan.
In the same period, the company's traditional online marketing revenue was 13.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year decline of 19%, and the overall traditional business is facing shrinkage. Net profit in the second quarter was 2.3 billion yuan, down 68% year-on-year.
Since the beginning of this year, the company's market value has dropped by more than 30%, and its current market value is about 261.3 billion Hong Kong dollars. The company is undergoing a valuation test.