Proprietary AI systems now account for only 21.6% of traffic on the Vercel AI Gateway. Combined inference spending for Chinese labs DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Z.ai has moved past the totals for OpenAI on the platform, reflecting a preference for cheaper, open-weight models. These open alternatives now drive 78.4% of the gateway's token volume, nearly doubling their share since June.

Corporate revenue remains concentrated in the U.S., with OpenAI and Anthropic posting estimated annual recurring revenues of $40 billion and $65 billion. Major Chinese AI developers combined generate roughly $10.7 billion, including $4 billion from ByteDance and $500 million from DeepSeek. Third-party providers including Together, Fireworks, and Baseten capture the inference spending for these open models by hosting them on their own infrastructure.