American cloud providers Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services as well as data service providers such as Databricks and Snowflake have begun hosting Chinese AI models and promising the best inferencing speeds.
A small team of 150 engineers at DeepSeek led by a hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng has put China, till now ignored by the global North, on the international AI map. American cloud providers Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services as well as data service providers such as Databricks and Snowflake have begun hosting Chinese AI models and promising the best inferencing speeds.
This comes nearly two years after China’s strong entry into AI models, which never found adoption among the cloud leaders. However, DeepSeek is not the only challenger. Since 2023, China’s tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu have released top-tier AI models across modalities like text, images, video and audio. Chinese startups, investors and the government have been contributing in equal measure to growing the AI research ecosystem despite America’s chip bans.
