Woofun AI data shows that rising AI costs are driving overseas startups and developers to adopt Chinese models such as DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI for inference efficiency. DeepSeek’s share of AI traffic on Vercel climbed from under 1% in May to 17%, while OpenRouter reported a doubling of DeepSeek usage in the first half of 2026, making it the platform's most popular model. Token usage for open-source models from Xiaomi, MiniMax, and Tencent continues to grow, contrasting with declining shares for Google and OpenAI.