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Article: China’s MiniMax, Moonshot top AI token use ranking, ending year of US dominance

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6 / 10

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Chinese AI models from MiniMax and Moonshot AI have topped a global token usage ranking, ending a year of market dominance by US developers. The ranking, from platform OpenRouter, shows high demand for Chinese open-source models following new releases.

MiniMax's M2.5 model was the most popular by token usage this month, followed by Moonshot's Kimi K2.5. Together with DeepSeek, these Chinese firms accounted for nearly two-thirds of the token usage among the top five ranked models.

The main topics covered are the shift in AI model usage dominance from the US to China, the performance of specific Chinese AI companies and models, and the metrics used to measure this demand.

Original URL

https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3344587/chinas-minimax-moonshot-top-ai-token-use-ranking-ending-year-us-dominance?utm_source=rss_feed

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Tech - South China Morning Post

Published Date

2026-02-25 11:30

Fetched Date

2026-03-04 14:30

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2026-03-04 15:22

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Present

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Not Clustered

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China’s MiniMax, Moonshot top AI token use ranking, ending year of US dominance
AI hosting platform OpenRouter’s latest ranking shows high demand for Chinese open-source models following a series of new releases
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Ben Jiangin Beijing
Chinese open-source artificial intelligence models, led by those from MiniMax AI and Moonshot AI, have topped global token usage, ending a year of market dominance for US developers, according to data from OpenRouter.
Online AI hosting platform OpenRouter’s latest ranking reflected the increased international demand for Chinese open-source models on its site following a series of new releases.
Launched around two weeks ago, the M2.5 from Shanghai-based MiniMax emerged as the most popular AI model by token usage so far this month, according to OpenRouter, which found 4.55 trillion tokens used on the M2.5 model by developers via its platform.
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A token is the fundamental unit of data input – including whole words, parts of words, characters or punctuation marks – that an AI model processes to generate output.
Released last month, Kimi K2.5 from Beijing-headquartered Moonshot was ranked second with 4.02 trillion tokens used by developers on OpenRouter.
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The rest of OpenRouter’s top-five ranking included Google DeepMind’s Gemini 3 Flash Preview, V3.2 from Hangzhou-based DeepSeek and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5.
MiniMax, Moonshot and DeepSeek accounted for nearly two thirds of the total token usage among the top five models ranked this month, according to OpenRouter.
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