Chinese AI Rivals Generate Only 10% of OpenAI and Anthropic Revenue, Rhodium Says
All Chinese AI models combined generate roughly 10% of the revenue reported by OpenAI and Anthropic, according to estimates from Rhodium Group. Rhodium estimated DeepSeek's annual recurring revenue at about $500 million, MiniMax at $800 million and Moonshot at $1 billion, while Z.ai recently told investors its ARR had reached $1.8 billion, ByteDance was estimated at roughly $4 billion and Alibaba at $2.4 billion. Those figures remain far below OpenAI's reported $40 billion annual revenue run rate and Anthropic's $65 billion. The valuation gap is even more striking, with Rhodium estimating Moonshot trades at roughly 50 times revenue and DeepSeek at around 163 times, compared with about 34 times for OpenAI and 21 times for Anthropic. Rhodium partner Logan Wright said the financing gap means it will be far more difficult for Chinese frontier AI labs to scale sustainably.
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Manus Seeks $500 Million Round as Asia's AI Agent Market Splinters
Manus is in advanced discussions for a $500 million funding round at a $4 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg, following Beijing's NDRC blocking of Meta's $2 billion acquisition of the firm in April 2026. Co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao were summoned and barred from leaving China, forcing the company to pivot from a potential US acquisition target into a cornerstone of the domestic Chinese AI ecosystem, though the round is not yet closed and terms remain subject to change. In Seoul, Enhans, which raised a $38 million Series C confirmed in a September 17, 2026 press release, is embedding its AgentOS into Korean manufacturing and finance, with the round co-led by TIMEFOLIO Asset Management and Stonebridge Ventures and strategic participation from POSCO Investment, LG CNS, and Lotte Ventures, whose chaebol groups already run the technology in live production. Huawei, meanwhile, launched its AI Cluster Service and agent-specific tools including Agentic MaaS and the AgentArts platform at HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, with Dr. Peter Zhou emphasizing that infrastructure must evolve to support secure, reliable agent workloads in production; the Agentic Infra paradigm already serves over 3,500 customers, and while AICS is available in China starting September 30, global availability is not slated until November 30. Together these moves signal that the agent market is splitting along regional lines of data structuring, compute hosting, and regulatory oversight, leaving open whether these silos will converge through open standards or harden into permanent, incompatible zones.
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Nvidia CEO Huang Says AI Spending Flywheel Is 'Really, Really Flying'
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said demand for artificial intelligence computing is accelerating, describing the resulting investment cycle as a flywheel that is "really, really flying." Speaking with CNBC's Jim Cramer at Dreamforce in San Francisco, Huang estimated that a 1-gigawatt Nvidia AI factory costs about $50 billion to $60 billion to build but can generate roughly $50 billion in annual rental revenue, implying a return on invested capital of about one year. He said token generation has increased 25-fold in less than a year, with open models now accounting for nearly 70% of generated tokens, up from about 30%. Huang also said Nvidia Grace Blackwell systems now rent for about $16 per GPU hour, versus roughly $5 under some contracts signed a year ago, and he expects AI testing to become a third major category of infrastructure alongside training and inference, requiring additional data centers.
