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Indian companies look to Chinese LLMs as AI costs bite
DeepSeek and others are winning on price, but concerns over foreign dependence loom.
kr-asia.com
Indian companies look to Chinese LLMs as AI costs bite
DeepSeek and others are winning on price, but concerns over foreign dependence loom.
kr-asia.com
Indian companies look to Chinese LLMs as AI costs bite
Written by Nikkei Asia Published on 21 Jul 2026Indian companies are increasingly leaning on Chinese large language models (LLMs) developed by DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI to contain their artificial intelligence spends, extending India’s reliance on China for cutting-edge technologies despite a long history of standoffs between the neighbors.
Puneet Kumar, CEO at Mirae Asset Venture Investments India, said that several consumer technology startups that he has met since mid-2025 use such Chinese open-weight LLMs—those that rely on publicly accessible parameters—which help drive down costs by an “order of magnitude.”
Because these parameters are publicly available, users can download and modify them on their own computers, in contrast to the proprietary offerings by US frontier labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The Chinese open-weight LLMs can be accessed in India through service providers such as Microsoft at a fraction of the price of their American counterparts, thanks to their low cost of development.
“The US models are expensive, and for a lot of basic things, you don’t need them,” Gupta said. “It’s overkill, like trying to drive a sports car on a crowded city road.”
For the DeepSeek models that Microsoft makes available in southern India through its Foundry platform, charges range between USD 0.19–1.74 per million input tokens—the tiny units of data that AI models process—while the prices for output tokens range between USD 0.51–5.40 per million. Input costs for Moonshot’s Kimi go up to USD 0.95, while output costs can reach USD 4 per million tokens.
Companies like Coinbase, DoorDash, and Airbnb have publicly said that they have begun using Chinese models.
Vidya Madhavan, founder of Elevation Capital-backed dating app Schmooze, said that possibilities of “substantial” savings, coupled with wider uptake of open-weight LLMs globally and their ability to deliver a satisfactory performance in comparison with their US peers, encouraged her to deploy Alibaba’s Qwen models after some initial hesitation.
