Rhodium: Chinese AI labs priced at 163-167x ARR vs OpenAI's 34x and Anthropic's 21x
rohanpaul_ai · x · 2026-09-18
- New Rhodium research shows Chinese frontier labs trade at far higher valuation-to-ARR multiples than US peers: Moonshot at roughly 167x and DeepSeek at 163x, versus 34x for OpenAI and 21x for Anthropic.
- Moonshot's valuation alone jumped from $4B at end-2025 to $50B by August 2026.
- The premium reflects a weak denominator: open-weight distribution limits direct monetization, model prices are dramatically lower, and Chinese customers historically pay less for SaaS/cloud.
- The revenue gap is stark: OpenAI at $40B ARR and Anthropic at $65B, versus $4B for ByteDance's model business and $2.3-2.4B for Alibaba's Bailian MaaS — OpenAI and Anthropic together earn 10x all Chinese AI models combined.
- Chinese models logged over 2B Hugging Face downloads in 2025 (41% globally), showing influence that hasn't converted into proportional revenue.
Related event: Rhodium: OpenAI and Anthropic Out-earn All Chinese AI Models by 10x(6 posts)→
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