American developers accelerate adoption of Chinese AI models to cut costs but face revenue conversion challenges

Mars Finance news. According to a report by Rest of World, for the purpose of dramatically cutting operating costs, U.S. developers and startups are accelerating their adoption of Chinese AI models such as DeepSeek, Minimax, and Kimi. Because these Chinese AI models offer extremely high cost-effectiveness in handling common tasks like writing code, their market share is growing rapidly. Data shows that in May, DeepSeek’s token usage share on the service provider Vercel platform rose from less than 1% to 17%. In addition, it is also reported that Microsoft is exploring using DeepSeek or other open-source models as low-cost alternatives to Copilot.

However, despite Chinese AI models being welcomed by the market for their price advantage, many U.S. companies and developers choose to access these models indirectly through local servers or U.S.-based cloud service providers due to U.S. domestic political review and concerns about data security. This means that while Chinese AI companies are facing high usage rates, they still find it difficult to effectively convert traffic into substantial direct revenue and long-term enterprise-level customer trust in the U.S. market.