How China's AI Giants Are Stretching Compute Budgets in the Race Against U.S. Labs

A detailed analysis from the South China Morning Post examines how Chinese AI companies — including Baidu, ByteDance, and others — are achieving competitive model performance while spending a fraction of what U.S. counterparts spend on compute. The piece highlights techniques including aggressive model distillation, hardware-software co-optimization for domestically available chips, and creative batching strategies that squeeze more inference throughput per dollar. For developers evaluating cost-efficiency in their own ML pipelines, the strategies described have direct applicability regardless of geography. The analysis also contextualizes why Chinese models like DeepSeek have punched above expectations — efficiency is a forced constraint that has become a competitive strength. This framing is useful for anyone making infrastructure or model selection decisions under compute budget pressure.