High cost-performance key advantage of China's AI models

The large artificial intelligence (AI) models developed by Chinese technology firms with high cost-performance have been attracting more and more users both at home and abroad.

Data from a top global AI platform, OpenRouter, showed that API calls, or user visits, to Chinese large models began surpassing U.S. levels in February, highlighting China's rising influence in the global AI ecosystem.

Chinese models occupy three of the top five spots globally by usage -- MiniMax's M2.5, Moonshot's Kimi K2.5 and DeepSeek's V3.2 -- mainly driven by their high cost-performance, according to the platform.

"For instance, it would take me five to 10 minutes to create such an e-commerce website. It's high in efficiency and cost performance. Because the model scale is small, its cost is not that high, about three to five yuan, which is much cheaper," said Liang Li, product manager of MiniMax, a company for multi-modal models and AI-native products.

MiniMax's M2.5 has topped the global call volume chart for five consecutive weeks.

"Compared with us, overseas models of the same capability level are more than 10 times the price of ours. Seeing the similar capabilities while at much lower price, users will naturally choose us. [We hope] more people enjoy artificial intelligence while it doesn't impose a higher burden on them in terms of cost," said Yan Yijun, vice president of the MiniMax.

The first key factor of the high cost-performance is technological innovation. In simple terms, it means completing the same task with fewer tokens, units of data processed by AI models.

Another key factor is the energy advantage. Stable energy supply and low electricity prices contributed a more competitive cost for China's AI industry.

"In China, we have a lot of quantity of energy at low prices. This was really a strategic long-term planning that was done before that today supports the AI industries and is able to keep prices affordable for electricity, but also for AI as well," said Giacomo Ficari, head of international business for Kimi, an AI chatbot, at Moonshot AI, an AI company based in Beijing.

"Seeing from the evolution of the computing power market, there are basically two models. One is the single card with the price of about 10 yuan an hour; the other is charged according to token. When calculated based on millions of tokens, it is much cheaper. The domestic products are at 0.2 yuan per million tokens," said Sun Tao, president of Worki, a cloud service provider.

High cost-performance key advantage of China's AI models

China's traditional building materials industry accelerated its structural optimization amid headwinds in the first quarter of this year, with green development emerging as a core growth engine.

As the traditional building materials industry steps up its green transformation, a cumulative total of 29.8 million tons of low-efficiency production capacity has been phased out, reversing the decline of capacity utilization, industry data showed.

The industry of advanced inorganic non-metallic materials, represented by photovoltaic glass, glass fiber and its products, experienced rapid growth. Demand for photovoltaic glass accounted for nearly 50 percent of total flat glass demand, and the total profit of the industry of glass fiber and its products surged by 130 percent year on year.

Meanwhile, green building materials recorded growth in both volume and profitability. By the end of the first quarter, China's certified green building materials increased by 5 percent compared with the end of 2025, and the industry's total profits grew 16.2 percent year on year.

"Ten government departments, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, have jointly issued an implementation plan for high-quality development of the green building materials industry, guiding the green transition of the sector. In the first quarter of the year, the total revenue of the green building materials industry exceeded 61.1 billion yuan (about 8.99 billion U.S. dollars), maintaining a rapid growth of 12 percent and laying a solid foundation for achieving the annual revenue target of 300 billion yuan," said Yan Xiaofeng, president of the China Building Materials Federation.

China’s traditional building materials industry speeds up green transition in Q1