The Chinese AI Market Map
This Week In Business AI [Week #6-2026]
The Chinese AI economy has emerged as a vertically integrated ecosystem where platform distribution—not model capability—determines consumer market share. This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the market architecture, competitive dynamics, and strategic implications for investors, enterprise leaders, startups, and policymakers.
The core thesis is straightforward: Big Tech platforms (Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu) leverage super-app ecosystems to dominate consumer AI, while frontier research players like DeepSeek create periodic disruption windows through efficiency breakthroughs. Value concentrates at the poles—platform distribution and frontier research—while the “squeezed middle” of Big Tech-backed startups becomes infrastructure suppliers.
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The weekly newsletter is in the spirit of what it means to be a Business Engineer:
We always want to ask three core questions:
What’s the shape of the underlying technology that connects the value prop to its product?
What’s the shape of the underlying business that connects the value prop to its distribution?
How does the business survive in the short term while adhering to its long-term vision through transitional business modeling and market dynamics?
These non-linear analyses aim to isolate the short-term buzz and noise, identify the signal, and ensure that the short-term and the long-term can be reconciled.
