UBS says 60% of companies now watching AI budgets are moving to cheaper models and open-source Chinese models
Rohan Paul Twitter · Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) · 2026-06-26
A UBS report finds 60% of enterprises monitoring AI budgets are shifting to cheaper models and open-source Chinese AI models, driven by bills as high as $35,000 per month and teams exceeding usage quotas by 200%.
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Extraction
Topics: ai-cost-optimizationenterprise-aiopen-source-modelsmodel-routingchinese-ai-models
Claims
- 60% of enterprises monitoring AI budgets are migrating to cheaper or open-source Chinese models.
- Some enterprise users are spending up to $35,000 per month on AI, with teams exceeding quotas by 200%.
- Companies are reducing the number of internal AI tools, cutting from five to two in some cases.
- Model routing—assigning easy tasks to cheaper models and complex tasks to premium models—is emerging as the dominant cost management strategy.
- Chinese open-source models including Qwen, DeepSeek, MiniMax, GLM, and Kimi are competitive on enterprise cost curves due to local and cloud deployment options.
Key quotes
The pressure is coming from extreme bills, including users spending up to $35K/month, teams exceeding quotas by 200%, and companies cutting internal AI tools from 5 to 2.
Companies are not abandoning AI, they are using model routing, which sends easy tasks to cheaper models and saves premium models for hard reasoning, code, and long-context work.