Fierce Competition: The 10 Largest AI Companies in China and the US
The artificial intelligence race is not only playing out through the capabilities of models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, and Kimi. The competition is also reflected in the massive valuations of the companies developing these technologies.
This list only includes companies that possess their own AI models or systems and whose products are used directly by consumers, developers, companies, or professional operators.
The value of public companies uses market capitalisation at the last close of trading on Friday, 17 July 2026, while private companies use the valuation from the last completed funding or share sale transaction. For Chinese stocks, values are converted using the closing exchange rate on 17 July 2026, of US$1 to HK$7.8402 and RMB6.7767. All figures are rounded and presented in US dollars.
10 Largest AI Companies in the United States
Giant technology companies still dominate the United States list. However, the valuations of private AI companies have also soared sharply. Anthropic, the developer of Claude, even has a higher private valuation than OpenAI.
Anthropic and OpenAI have confidentially filed documents for an IPO with United States regulators. However, because the documents do not yet include the number of shares and the IPO price range, the value of both still uses the last funding valuation—not an IPO estimate.
Nvidia remains on the list because it has the Nemotron family of models used by developers and companies to build AI agents. However, Nemotron is more oriented towards developer and enterprise users, not consumer chatbot applications like ChatGPT or Claude.
Grok is no longer recorded as a standalone private company, xAI. After xAI was merged into SpaceX and SpaceX listed on the stock exchange in June 2026, Grok’s value is reflected in SpaceX’s market capitalisation.
The market caps of Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, and SpaceX represent the entire company’s value, not a valuation specific to their AI divisions. Waymo is also a subsidiary of Alphabet, so its valuation should not be added to Alphabet’s market cap to calculate a combined total.
10 Largest AI Companies in China
China features a combination of established technology firms and relatively new AI model developers. Tencent and ByteDance occupy the top positions thanks to the scale of their parent businesses, while Z.ai, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax represent a group of companies more focused on AI model development.
Kimi is the chatbot and model family belonging to Moonshot AI. The company remains private and last completed a funding round at a US$20 billion valuation. A previously reported figure of US$30 billion was a target for the next round and is therefore not used.
DeepSeek is reportedly in discussions for its next funding round at a valuation of around US$71 billion to US$74 billion. However, because the transaction has not been completed and the company has not officially submitted listing documents, the figure used is the last post-money valuation of US$52 billion.
ByteDance’s valuation of US$480 billion comes from the last confirmed secondary share transaction. Meanwhile, the market capitalisation of Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Z.ai, MiniMax, and SenseTime is calculated using the closing price on 17 July 2026 and total shares outstanding. Alibaba and Baidu ADR shares in the United States are not added again to avoid double-counting the company’s capitalisation.