appConfigEntityId

bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

isVideo

articlePageQuery

article

articleSchemaContent

content

hooksArticlePageAdvertisementConfigArticle

hooksArticlePageFloatingButtonConfigArticle

appConfig

filter

json

liveArticle

Xinmei Shen

The rise of Chinese open-weight models has shaken up the global artificial intelligence (AI) market in recent months. With China’s systems offering high performance at a lower cost, businesses around the world are looking at shifting away from Silicon Valley’s leading providers.
Now, a new Hong Kong-based company aims to turn that trend into a billion-dollar business.
The “neo-cloud” provider Antimatter is helping firms switch from the dominant US models – and the cloud systems that serve them – allowing them to cut costs and gain greater control over their data.
The company is rapidly building up its AI data centre capacity and expects revenue to “grow exponentially” over the next two years, as closed frontier AI models will “not be able to satisfy” rising global demand for AI.
A growing number of small businesses, government organisations and technology enthusiasts are seeking to reduce their reliance on the US tech giants, according to Queenie Chan, Antimatter’s chief marketing officer.
“Many of our customers are looking for alternative solutions to move off from the frontier models,” Chan said during an interview last week. “We are seeing quite a bit of inquiries coming in from the Middle East and Europe.”
Antimatter – which was established in Hong Kong in May – is the brainchild of three companies: the US energy provider Data Factory, French modular data centre operator PoliCloud, and Swiss AI inference platform HiveNet.
The new group aims to take on the market leaders in a booming sector known as neo-cloud, which provides specialised cloud infrastructure tailored to AI workloads that run on high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs).
Neo-cloud incumbents such as CoreWeave – which serves a range of US tech giants including OpenAI, Microsoft and IBM – have seen their sales skyrocket in recent months amid surging AI demand.
CoreWeave’s share price jumped more than 19 per cent on Wednesday after announcing its second-quarter revenue had more than doubled year on year. Nebius Group, another leading neo-cloud provider, saw its shares rise 34 per cent after reporting 454 per cent revenue growth.
Antimatter aims to secure a strong foothold in the market on the back of rising interest in alternatives to US-based AI infrastructure.


Chan said a “tech-savvy” French accounting firm, for example, had been spending €50,000 (US$57,900) a month on US hyperscaler compute for AI tasks such as document processing, before deciding to make a change after being acquired by a bigger company.
The firm not only needed to cut costs, but also wanted to “make sure that their data is processed and stored in Europe, which is not the case if you are using those frontier models”, Chan said.
“So, we helped them deploy two of the Qwen models, and then we put them in our French infrastructure,” she added, referring to Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group Holding’s family of large language models. Alibaba is the owner of the South China Morning Post.
This combination cut the firm’s AI costs by 40 per cent, Chan said, declining to name the French client for privacy reasons.
Antimatter plans to rapidly scale up its business. By the end of the year, it aims to deploy 100 Policloud data centres providing more than 40,000 GPUs. By 2030, that number is expected to soar to 1,000 Policlouds with more than 400,000 GPUs.
It also expects revenue to “grow exponentially” in the next 18 to 24 months, reaching €1 billion in 2028, according to Chan. The company is currently raising €300 million in equity financing, a process it aims to complete early next year.
While Nvidia remains the world’s dominant AI GPU supplier, Chan expects more players – especially Asian ones – to “disrupt the market”, especially as many AI applications do not necessarily require Nvidia’s high-end chips.
The growing popularity of Chinese AI models has also contributed to rising interest in Chinese chips, which often offer “full-stack solutions” with built-in software optimised for Chinese models, she noted.
Antimatter has a research and development department focused on testing chips on different large language models, and has been “studying” and working with suppliers from mainland China, South Korea and Taiwan, according to Chan.
While Europe, the United States and the Middle East remained Antimatter’s biggest markets, the company chose Hong Kong as its headquarters partly because of the strength of its logistics sector and proximity to Asia’s data centre supply chain, Chan said.
Hong Kong’s status as a financial centre was also part of the equation, she added. Last week, Nvidia announced partnerships with some of the world’s largest financial institutions – including BlackRock, Blackstone and Goldman Sachs – to “mobilise over US$500 billion of third-party capital to support the buildout of AI infrastructure”.


Tesla’s Elon Musk hails Xi Jinping’s leadership and Chinese AI strength

Korean dating show featuring AI and human contestants sparks fascination in China

Hong Kong needs social science to help deliver on its 5-year plan

AI trade outlook brightens on falling oil and Meta’s Muse agent ahead of Xi-Trump meeting

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Hong Kong firm bets on Chinese open-weight models to rival CoreWeave

A technician works at an Amazon Web Services AI data centre in the United States. Photo: Getty Images

Launch of DeepSeek’s Harness marks its strategic pivot towards autonomous agentic AI

A customer uses his phone in front of a board with the menu at AGI Bar in Beijing. Drinkers at the AI-themed bar in the city's tech district can even plug in to DeepSeek for free. Photo: AFP

The launch of DeepSeek’s much anticipated Harness marks a strategic pivot as the company looks beyond large language models towards autonomous agentic AI. Photo: Shutterstock 

Zhipu launches flagship model GLM-5.3 as China seeks Mythos-level edge in cyber defence

Zhipu says it has tested GLM-5.3 with security teams in China against real-world codebases, identifying 2,436 vulnerabilities across 269 projects after expert review. Photo: Shutterstock 

Chinese doctor stuns maths world by cracking decades-old problem using ChatGPT

Frontier artificial intelligence models are making rapid progress in mathematics. Photo: Shutterstock

AI demand drives triple-digit profit growth for Chinese chip foundries SMIC, Hua Hong

China's top two chipmakers saw their revenues and profits surge in the second quarter amid high demand for AI chips. Photo: Shutterstock

SMIC’s revenue for the three months ending June increased 36 per cent year on year to US$3 billion. Photo: Shutterstock

Hua Hong’s headquarters in Shanghai. Its quarterly revenue reached a record US$717.5 million. Photo: Handout

China’s tech giants fuel the rise of AI tokens as a new corporate currency

Illustration by Henry Wong

The ByteDance logo is seen in this illustration taken February 8, 2025. Photo: Reuters

The Tencent booth at the China International Fair for Trade in Services in Beijing, September 11, 2025. Photo: Reuters

Tech

Tech Trends

Big Tech

News

China Future Tech

‘Neo-cloud’ provider Antimatter is helping businesses shift away from the US’ frontier AI models, promising lower costs and greater data sovereignty


‘Neo-cloud’ provider Antimatter is helping businesses shift away from the US’ frontier AI models, promising lower costs and greater data sovereignty.


Hong Kong firm bets on Chinese open-weight models to rival CoreWeave

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}‘Neo-cloud’ provider Antimatter is helping businesses shift away from the US’ frontier AI models, promising lower costs and greater data sovereignty

‘Neo-cloud’ provider Antimatter is helping businesses shift away from the US’ frontier AI models, promising lower costs and greater data sovereignty