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China’s AI revenue projected to reach US$13b on breakthroughs, adoption: Goldman Sachs

Rising cost efficiency and rapidly advancing capabilities from players like DeepSeek and MiniMax have prompted Goldman Sachs to raise its run-rate revenue forecast for China’s…

By Samantha Johnson / August 5, 2026
Rising cost efficiency and rapidly advancing capabilities from players like DeepSeek and MiniMax have prompted Goldman Sachs to raise its run-rate revenue forecast for China’s artificial intelligence model market by 30 per cent to US$13 billion.
In a research note published on Monday, the US investment bank boosted its year-end annualised recurring revenue (ARR) projection for mainland Chinese AI models from US$10 billion, citing aggressive price cuts, technical breakthroughs and accelerating corporate adoption.

Goldman Sachs lifted projected year-end ARRs of Hong Kong-listed Zhipu AI and MiniMax to US$2.5 billion and US$1 billion, respectively.

“We expect competition for the best performance-to-price balance to intensify among Chinese AI models,” the report said, noting that recent releases from domestic pioneers had reached new frontiers in performance per dollar.

The heightened competition followed MiniMax’s launch last Friday of its H3 model under an open-weight approach. The multi-modal system – capable of processing text, image, video, audio and music – was priced at just 30 to 50 per cent of incumbent market levels, according to Goldman Sachs.

On the same day, DeepSeek officially launched application programming interface (API) access for its V4 Flash model, achieving front-end coding capabilities that rival Zhipu’s flagship GLM-5.2.

According to Arena AI’s latest leaderboard, GLM-5.2 ranks seventh in front-end coding globally, while DeepSeek V4 Flash closely follows in eighth place.

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