SINOLINK SECURITIES·2026-01-11 09:14Investment Rating - The report does not explicitly state an investment rating for the industry Core Insights - The competition in AI entry points is intensifying, with major companies increasing their investments. China's AI presence globally has significantly improved, with domestic large models continuously iterating. Despite GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro leading, Chinese models have effectively altered the North American dominance in the competitive landscape. In the global Top 10, three positions are held by Chinese models, and in the Top 15, there are six Chinese companies. By 2025, China's open-source AI model usage is expected to account for over 70% of the global market [2][11][19] - The demand for inference has surged, with the emergence of o1 class inference models unlocking approximately 10 times the potential of traditional models in terms of inference-time compute. The demand for computing power has shifted from being solely "training-driven" to a dual focus on "training + inference" [2][5][37] - The battle for entry points has evolved beyond mobile devices to OS-level intelligent agents and super apps. By December 24, 2025, ByteDance's AI application Doubao announced daily active users (DAU) exceeding 100 million, while Qianwen App reached over 30 million monthly active users within 23 days of public testing, becoming the fastest-growing AI application globally. Doubao bypasses traditional interfaces, creating an "AI operating system" that directly interacts with super apps like WeChat and Alipay, challenging the rules of the traditional app era [2][44][45] Summary by Sections AI Entry Point Competition - China's AI global presence has significantly improved, with domestic large models continuously iterating. In the global Top 10, three positions are held by Chinese models, and in the Top 15, there are six Chinese companies. By 2025, China's open-source AI model usage is expected to account for over 70% of the global market [2][11][19] - The competition for entry points has evolved beyond mobile devices to OS-level intelligent agents and super apps, with significant user engagement reported for new AI applications [2][44][45] Domestic Chip Breakthroughs - The smart computing center in China is expanding, with a projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 57% from 2020 to 2028, reaching 2,781.9 EFLOPS by 2028. Domestic chip technology is steadily improving, with local cloud service providers accelerating the construction of heterogeneous environments [5][50] - Domestic general-purpose GPUs are upgrading from "usable" to "good," with performance metrics approaching those of leading international models. The production capacity of domestic chip manufacturers like SMIC is continuously increasing, providing solid support for domestic AI chip production [5][53][54] Supply and Demand Dynamics - The demand side is characterized by a surge in inference demand as AI applications become more prevalent, while the supply side sees continuous improvements in domestic GPU performance and accelerated adaptation by cloud service providers [5][59] - The AI server market is expected to see a shift towards inference servers becoming the mainstream, with a projected market size of approximately $39.3 billion in 2024, reflecting a year-on-year growth of 49.7% [5][64]