A Whirlwind Tour of AI Development In China

This report seeks to answer several basic questions about Chinese AI companies including their funding, products and model capabilities, local and global adoption, and talent pool. Companies are divided into incumbents—Chinese tech companies—and unicorns—private companies founded since 2019 that have raised at least one billion dollars US and focused on AI research, such as DeepSeek and Zhipu AI. We aim to find multiple high-quality public sources to verify our answers to these questions and hope that these answers will give a good overview of the Chinese AI landscape to policy makers and researchers alike.