As US AI costs soar, global businesses pivot to China’s low-cost, open-weight models

A sharp narrowing of the performance gap is prompting some developers to shift from costly American giants to budget-friendly Chinese alternatives Since mid-June, the daily token volume of Zhipu’s GLM-5.2, which operates at about one-fifth the cost of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8, had surged 50-fold on Vercel, the San Francisco-based cloud platform for AI web development reported on Tuesday. Open-weight models accounted for 29 per cent of token volume on its AI Gateway platform, nearly tripling their share since April, according to Vercel. The rise of these cost-efficient powerhouses marks a growing shift in how companies worldwide source artificial intelligence. While proprietary, closed-source models require premium cloud subscriptions and charge by the token – the basic unit of data processed by an AI – open-weight models allow companies to download code for free and run it on local hardware. The fast-improving capabilities of these free-to-download models have forced businesses to re-evaluate their tech spending. Until recently, enterprises chose to absorb the high cost of premium American models because open alternatives lagged too far behind – a gap that is narrowing fast.

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