China-Based Labs' Share of AI Gateway Spend

## What this measures

The sum of the daily spend shares of labs headquartered in mainland China: DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Z.ai, StepFun, Alibaba, Xiaomi, InclusionAI, ByteDance, Kling AI, Tencent and Meituan. The list is Palanor's classification by headquarters. Spend measures dollars paid for a lab's models through the gateway. It shows where the money goes, which is not always where the volume goes.

## Why it matters

It measures how far developers route work to Chinese models when price and quality allow it: a live read on the US–China AI contest in production workloads, not benchmarks.

## How to read it

Higher means more gateway traffic runs on China-based labs. Watch it against export controls, sanctions news and model releases.

## What it does not say

It is the traffic of Vercel's AI Gateway customers, not the whole AI market. Vercel publishes shares, never volumes, so a rising share can mean one lab grew or the others shrank. A single large customer can move a day's share by several points; read the trend over weeks, not one day. Direct API traffic to the labs, and other gateways, are not included. Headquarters is not where a model is served: many of these models reach customers through US inference providers.

## Source

Vercel AI Gateway Leaderboard (https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/leaderboards), daily, from 1 October 2025. © 2026 Vercel. "AI Gateway Leaderboard Data" is licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Palanor stores each day's shares and derives the series shown here; the current, incomplete UTC day is never published.