U.S. Developers Accelerate Adoption of Chinese AI Models, DeepSeek Share Jumps to 17% in May

According to Rest of World, U.S. developers and startups are accelerating adoption of Chinese AI models including DeepSeek, Minimax, and Kimi to reduce operational costs. DeepSeek's token usage share on the Vercel platform jumped from below 1% to 17% in May, driven by the models' cost efficiency for common tasks like code generation.

However, despite their price advantages, Chinese AI model providers face hurdles converting U.S. traffic into direct revenue and enterprise customers due to domestic political scrutiny and data security concerns. Many U.S. enterprises access these models indirectly through local servers or American cloud providers, limiting Chinese AI firms' ability to monetize high usage volumes.