TIME is splitting its TIME100 Companies list into 20 industry-specific rankings for the first time, and the AI edition is a doozy. The magazine just named its 10 most influential AI companies for 2026 — and three of them are Chinese.
The list includes ByteDance, Amazon, Zhipu AI, OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Anthropic, Alibaba, Mistral, and Hugging Face. Yes, that's three Chinese companies in the top ten.
ByteDance made the cut on the back of its AI assistant Doubao (which means "bean bun" in Chinese). The app has over 155 million weekly active users and broke 100 million daily active users during the Lunar New Year. CEO Liang Rubo called the moment: "AI development is still in its early stages. We're only at the 500-meter mark of a marathon." ByteDance is spending more than $20 billion on capex in 2025, mostly on AI infrastructure, and reportedly plans to spend another $14 billion on Nvidia chips in 2026 — pending U.S. export approvals.
Then there's Zhipu AI, which TIME specifically tagged as "no Western chips needed." Zhipu went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January, raising $558 million in its IPO — the first Chinese large model company to list. Its GLM-5 model, released in February, was trained entirely on Huawei processors. It has 744 billion parameters, is released under an open-source license, and on some benchmarks beats Gemini 3 Pro while approaching Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 in coding and agent tasks. The company's annual revenue hit 724 million yuan (about $107 million), up 132% year over year.
Meanwhile, Xiaomi also entered the fray with its MiMo V2.5 model, which claims to rival Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4.
Alibaba earned its spot with the Qwen family of models. Cumulative downloads have surpassed 1 billion, with more than 200,000 derivative models. TIME called Qwen "the world's most popular open-source model family." Airbnb uses Qwen for AI customer service, and Pinterest taps it for visual content analysis. CEO Wu Yongming set a goal of hitting $100 billion in combined external cloud and AI revenue within five years.
The other seven companies include:
- Amazon: its Trainium chip cluster, plus investments in both Anthropic and OpenAI.
- OpenAI: over 900 million weekly active users and $2 billion in monthly revenue.
- Alphabet: annual revenue broke $400 billion for the first time.
- Meta: AI-powered ad revenue at record levels.
- Anthropic: after refusing to loosen restrictions for the Pentagon, its customer base actually grew.
- Mistral: $400 million annualized revenue, with a framework agreement already signed with the French military.
- Hugging Face: hosting over 2 million models and 500,000 datasets.
The news comes as cloud providers tighten GPU supply, squeezing AI startups with 32% price hikes and year-long waits.
And in another sign of the AI arms race, China's Zhongshu Ruizhi closed a nine-figure Series B round, positioning itself as a Palantir clone for the enterprise AI agent market.
But let's be real: with ByteDance and Zhipu both betting big on homegrown infrastructure, and Alibaba's Qwen racking up a billion downloads, the message is clear — the AI race isn't just about San Francisco anymore.