My greater point remains. Models like the qwen variants, minimax, k2.5, glm models are available by American providers like AWS at a much cheaper price than api offerings from the big three LLM providers.
Your point about Chinese models being cheap only on Chinese hardware makes absolutely zero sense. You can check out the model catalog like together ai’s qwen 3.5 9b offering. It’s 25 cents for 1M tokens vs the ridiculous $5/1M tokens for haiku.