Food delivery giant Meituan, smartphone and EV maker Xiaomi, and Genshin Impact developer miHoYo are each building their own LLMs, crowding a Chinese AI field where no lab has broken away from the pack, according to Juro Osawa at The Information. MiHoYo plans to spend up to 100 billion yuan ($14.9B) on AI across three years and is trying to get Nvidia’s Blackwell chips to train competitive models. Osawa argues the field hasn’t consolidated because Chinese tech companies distrust one another and would rather build than buy, and because distilling outputs from OpenAI and Anthropic models gives newcomers a cheap way to catch up. Startups also tend to hold out for an IPO rather than sell, which keeps acquisitions rare.
