Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) models have taken the top five spots in weekly token usage, according to OpenRouter, a global large-language model (LLM) aggregation platform. From October 5 to 11, AI models worldwide processed 172 trillion tokens, up 3.61% week-on-week. Chinese models accounted for 86.74 trillion tokens, compared with 18.97 trillion for U.S. AI models. Token usage by Chinese AI models grew by 50.96% week-on-week, while usage by U.S. models increased by 17.1%. It was the 24th consecutive week that Chinese models led their U.S. counterparts in token usage. A token is the basic unit of text processed by an AI model and it has become a key measure of AI usage and computing consumption.
DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash led the ranking, processing 41 trillion tokens during the week, up 60% week-on-week. The other AI models in the top five also came from Chinese companies. Z.ai's GLM 5.3 Flash ranked second, processing 12.2 trillion tokens during the week, up 26% week-on-week. Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6-Flash came in third, processing 11.5 trillion tokens, up 19% week-on-week. Shanghai-based AI firm StepFun's Step 5 Preview ranked fourth, processing 8.84 trillion tokens. Tencent Hy4 preview ranked fifth, processing 8.28 trillion tokens, up 27% week-on-week. During the week, the five leading Chinese models accounted for 47.9% of tokens processed. Global corporate adoption of Chinese models increased substantially in 2026, according to CNBC. Chinese models accounted for just 6% to 13% of uses on OpenRouter in February.
Chinese analysts said that the models' strong weekly performance underscored rapid growth in global uses as developers worldwide increasingly turned to Chinese companies' low-cost, open-weight models. Tian Feng, President of the Fast Think Institute and former Dean of the Intelligence Industry Research Institute at SenseTime, told the Global Times that the ranking represented an overall endorsement of Chinese models' capabilities, stability and cost-effectiveness. DeepSeek's performance was particularly noteworthy because the company significantly raised application programming interface prices for its latest flagship models in mid-August. Chinese analysts said that the steady performance by Chinese AI models is underpinned by the robust growth in AI infrastructure in the country, the constantly expanding and diversifying application scenarios and a growing digital economy ecosystem.
With several leading Chinese AI services boasting active user bases of more than 100 million, AI has entered the daily lives of Chinese people, providing a strong foundation for AI companies to generate revenue growth, said tech industry analyst Ma Jihua. In one recent example of China's AI infrastructure buildup, the China Mobile Hohhot Data Center in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, which is the largest single-site intelligent computing center operated by any telecom carrier in the world, completed its extension project. The center boasts a total computing power capacity of 20,100 petaflops and 88% of the power needed to run the data center will be from green electricity sourced from regional wind and solar farms, the China Daily reports.
