China’s tech giants are deepening their push into enterprise AI to drive profits.
For years, China’s AI race was dominated by a quest for market share, but Alibaba and Tencent are now also trying to grow by bundling their models into workplace tools, while ByteDance announced last week it was merging the product teams of its enterprise offering and its popular AI chatbot.
A price war, however, threatens to erode margins: Alibaba unveiled a powerful new open-weight model that’s cheaper than US frontier competitors, while DeepSeek released a hyper-discounted offering. Chinese tech stocks have fallen: “A sector can lead the world in capability and still be a poor place in which to seek market gains,” one expert wrote.
