SenseTime (商汤)

SenseTime is the counter-example that keeps the China-lab read honest. It is the pivot case - a computer-vision company that rebuilt itself around generative AI, which is now 79.9% of revenue - and its H1 2026 goes the opposite way to Zhipu on every line that matters: gross margin UP 2.9 points to 41.4% while Zhipu halved to 26.4%, gross profit growing faster than revenue, and the first IFRS profit since the 2021 listing. Two cautions keep it from settling the argument. The profit is substantially fair-value gains on strategic investments in AI ecosystem companies; the non-IFRS adjusted result is still a RMB 390M loss, and both descriptions of the half are accurate. And "generative AI revenue" here includes selling compute through its Token Factory, which is a different business from selling model access and carries different economics. What SenseTime does prove is that 41.4% is achievable by a company that is 80% generative AI by revenue - so the 18-26% at the young pure-plays is a stage, or a business-model choice, not a law. It also publishes the one number nobody else does: 2.4 trillion tokens served daily in July 2026, roughly 22x YoY, against 48,000 petaflops deployed.