This is the best piece I’ve read to date on the Chinese data economy for LLMs, and how it compares to the US counterparts (summarized by Mercor, Surge, and Handshake having the biggest network, SUPPLY, but also many companies with specialized services, in the form of RL-ready environments). China’s leading spenders, Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance, don’t mirror OpenAI and Anthropic leading the US market.
The Chinese market likely has a bias similar to their “ownership” mentality of more LLM builders in house, like Meituan, RedNote, and Xiaomi, whereas major US tech services build more on APIs and existing open-weight models.
Altogether, it seems like Chinese labs were 6–12 months behind on willingness to spend on data, relative to the US, but are rapidly catching up.
I've been hearing lots of murmurings on China's AI industry, but folks are secretive, so it's hard to put this all together.