云大厂“亏钱卖”友商AI，重回21年恶性竞争老路
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Merged summary
TL;DR - Chinese cloud providers are reportedly reselling third-party models such as GLM, Kimi, and DeepSeek at discounts as steep as 70%, sometimes below cost, to meet aggressive AI revenue targets. The price war risks repeating the low-margin resale problems of China’s 2021 cloud market, although leading model startups now possess stronger technical leverage over platforms.
- Cloud vendors increasingly count third-party model sales toward internal targets because their own models are not always customers’ preferred options, particularly for AI coding.
- Because providers sell identical model APIs, differentiation has largely collapsed to price, pushing discounts from 40% to 70% and some transactions into loss-making territory.
- The resale strategy can inflate revenue while depressing margins and discouraging sales teams from promoting internally developed products.
- Unlike earlier SaaS vendors, model companies have harder-to-copy advantages in talent, training infrastructure, data engineering, post-training, and rapid model iteration, making cloud platforms more likely to remain channels than replace them.
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云大厂“亏钱卖”友商AI，重回21年恶性竞争老路
TL;DR - Chinese cloud providers are reportedly reselling third-party models such as GLM, Kimi, and DeepSeek at discounts as steep as 70%, sometimes below cost, to meet aggressive AI revenue targets. The price war risks repeating the low-margin resale problems of China’s 2021 cloud market, although leading model startups now possess stronger technical leverage over platforms.
- Cloud vendors increasingly count third-party model sales toward internal targets because their own models are not always customers’ preferred options, particularly for AI coding.
- Because providers sell identical model APIs, differentiation has largely collapsed to price, pushing discounts from 40% to 70% and some transactions into loss-making territory.
- The resale strategy can inflate revenue while depressing margins and discouraging sales teams from promoting internally developed products.
- Unlike earlier SaaS vendors, model companies have harder-to-copy advantages in talent, training infrastructure, data engineering, post-training, and rapid model iteration, making cloud platforms more likely to remain channels than replace them.