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.
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.
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.