The advances made in the field of artificial intelligence in China in 2025 attracted attention in the international arena and occupied a critical place on the country’s agenda. While the worldwide success of large language models developed by Chinese companies reveals the intensity and rapid development of artificial intelligence competition in the country, the number of users has increased with the increase in demand for productive artificial intelligence technologies.
Compared to OpenAI and other US-based players with low cost and limited computationThe release of DeepSeek’s open source model called R1, which achieves high performance, on January 20, broke the rules in the industry. This development also attracted the attention of Chinese innovators who competed with the billions of dollars of investments of US giants, and was considered to invalidate the claim that China was behind them.
The success of DeepSeek pointed out that China is rapidly catching up with the artificial intelligence revolution that the United States started at the same time that ChatGPT was released in 2022. The political leadership in China has identified artificial intelligence as a key technology of the future and called for mobilizing resources in this field. In addition, some leading large companies in the country aimed to stand out in global competition by empowering domestic production.
Generative artificial intelligence and the transformation in technologyIn this context, China quickly adapted to the new era that OpenAI implemented with ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, and launched productive artificial intelligence with domestic market protection, just like in internet management. In this process, giants such as Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba and Huawei concentrated on large language models; Start-ups such as Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and 01.AI have turned to developing more extreme productive solutions. Founded in 2023, DeepSeek attracted attention as one of the rare companies that managed to produce a high-performance model with a young engineering team.
DeepSeek at a cost of approximately 5.6 million dollarsWhile the model it developed questioned the investment burden of its competitors in the USA and China, it was seen that players such as Chinese technology giants Alibaba were trying to close the gap. In this process, start-ups such as Moonshot AI, Zhipu AI and Minimax launched new generation models in the second half of the year, while companies from different sectors such as RedNote and Meituan accelerated their work on open source models. In the long term, evaluations were made that this move reduced the gap between the USA and China in the field of artificial intelligence.
Increase in the number of artificial intelligence usersThe number of users of China’s productive AI systems increased significantly in the first half of 2025. According to the CNNIC report, the number of users, which was 249 million in December 2024, reached 515 million in June 2025, and the usage rate increased to 36.5%. Chinese open source models, which started with a 1.2% market share from global use at the end of 2024, increased to 30% by the end of 2025, and Chinese became one of the most used languages after English. According to CAICT data, the volume of the domestic artificial intelligence industry, which was 900 billion yuan in 2024, exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan in 2025.
chip problemIn the ongoing global competition with China, the USA’s attempts to limit high-tech chip exports against China continue. The export of Nvidia’s models such as A100, A800, H100 and H800 to China was among the topics discussed in the new period. The launch of the China-specific coco H20 in the markets towards the end of 2024 created a new dynamic in the chip supply chain. The Trump administration’s continued chip restrictions supported Chinese manufacturer Huawei’s announcement of a roadmap for the Ascend series and China’s self-sufficiency goals. Xi Jinping’s view of artificial intelligence as a strategic field has strengthened his quest for independence in core technologies.
Domestic production and public offeringsHe came to the fore with Moore Threads’ IPO on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the success of book-raising of 8 billion yuan. MetaX, on the other hand, attracted the attention of investors with its 4.2 billion yuan IPO in Shanghai and made significant gains during the trading days. This chart showed the increasing interest and confidence of Chinese investors in the production of chips for artificial intelligence model training and general-purpose computing.
