A year ago, mentioning DeepSeek or Qwen in an enterprise planning meeting got you blank stares. Today those two names alone represent roughly 15% of the global AI market , up from barely 1% at the start of 2025. That's not a rounding error — it's the fastest share shift the AI infrastructure market has seen. The question enterprises are asking has changed. It's no longer "are these models good enough?" It's "how do we deploy them without creating a liability?"

The number that gets everyone's attention

The pitch is usually cost. Teams that route routine work to cheaper open models and escalate only the hardest tasks to premium ones report cutting inference bills by more than 80% compared to a closed-model-only stack. That's the kind of number that gets a CFO's attention in a budget meeting. But it comes with a catch that rarely makes it into the pitch deck: those savings assume the deployment is architected correctly .…