Chinese Companies Open-Source AI Models as Computing Power Rises

Step-Video-T2V effects

TMTPOST -- Step AI, one of six leading Chinese AI startups, in collaboration with Geely Auto Group, released two open-source Step series multimodal models on Tuesday. These models are now available for global developers.

The first model, Step-Video-T2V, is the world's largest and most powerful open-source video generation model, boasting 30 billion parameters. It can generate 204-frame, 540P resolution high-quality videos.

The second model, Step-Audio, is the industry's first product-level open-source speech interaction model, with 130 billion parameters. It can generate emotional, dialectic, and personalized speech styles, providing natural, high-quality conversations and high-fidelity voice recreations for various industries like entertainment, social media, and gaming.

Step AI released the StepEval-Audio-360 benchmark, a multidimensional evaluation system, and a new video quality evaluation dataset, Step-Video-T2V-Eval, to assess 11 aspects of video generation, including motion, aesthetics, and realism. The Step-Video-T2V model excelled in areas like instruction compliance and motion smoothness.

On the same day, Kunlun Wanwei, a leading Chinese Internet company, also released two open-source video generation models—SkyReels-V1 for AI short films and SkyReels-A1 for facial action control. SkyReels-V1 is the largest model for both text-to-video and image-to-video generation, offering enhanced efficiency and lower latency.

In 2024, the scale and market size of China’s intelligent computing power reported a surge of 74.1% and 86.9% year-on-year, respectively, according to an industry report jointly released by IDC and Inspur on Sunday.

It is expected that by 2025, the scale of China's intelligent computing power will increase by 43% compared to 2024, and the AI computing power market size in China will reach $25.9 billion, a 36.2% increase from 2024, the report said.

As of now, there are 647 AI computing power-related companies in China, data from Qichacha showed.

Over the past decade, the number of registered companies in this sector has been steadily increasing. In 2024, 207 new companies were registered, a year-on-year increase of 52.21%, and in the beginning of 2025, 15 new AI computing power-related companies have already been registered.