0
Applied AI·July 21, 2026·1 min read

The Open Source AI China Problem Just got Worse

Share

When HBM, energy, and datacenter bottlenecks collide with geopolitics, “open source” models become strategic assets whose provenance and hosting jurisdiction matter. If you’re standardizing on open models, track where they’re trained, who funds them, and how export regimes could affect long-term availability.

Applied AI

Docs: AI data startup Mercor had $614M in gross revenue in H1 2026, up 70% from all of 2025, with ~91% from foundation model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic

A three-year-old data vendor doing $614 million in H1 revenue — 91% from top model labs — shows that high-quality human feedback is a primary cost center in frontier model training. If you’re not a lab, expect tighter competition and higher prices for the same annotator and evaluator capacity you need for your own systems.