Architectural Choices in China's Open-Source AI Ecosystem: Building Beyond DeepSeek

China's open-source AI ecosystem has shifted toward Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures as the default choice, prioritizing cost-performance balance over maximum capability. Leading organizations expanded beyond text models into multimodal domains (video, audio, 3D), with growing emphasis on small models (0.5B-30B parameters) for practical deployment. Apache 2.0 became the standard license, reducing friction for production use. A significant strategic shift emerged toward hardware-first development, with models increasingly optimized for domestic Chinese chips (Huawei Ascend, Cambricon, Baidu Kunlun) in both inference and training. Companies are open-sourcing production-grade serving systems and infrastructure, moving competition from isolated model performance to full-stack ecosystem design.