We built a complete production-grade inference service from scratch on a cluster of more than 100,000 Chinese-made AI accelerators. All production inference for GLM-5.3-Flash runs on this system.
china has cheap abundant power, now they can make their own inference chips (which was supposed to be a chokepoint), their models yeah can be 6 months behind the frontier - but most people don't need frontier models - small models r more than enough.
my only wish was labs like Mistral would make their own inference chips or partner up eg with established / new chip makers or companies like Oxide.
Only the US sees this as a competition, new space race, Cold War, etc.
Also, don’t underestimate data retention and such. Big Corp will never send their LLM traffic to China.
Perhaps more than the price advantage is the prioritisation in grid infrastructure. As a strategic industrial concern in China you almost certainly get easy access to transformers, grid connections, water etc which is a big bottleneck in the US.