While the USA and China dominate the discourse on AI, several other countries are making significant strides toward creating a more multipolar global AI model development ecosystem.

Market leaders like the US and China have seen substantial investments in R&D, driven by established tech giants and the emergence of startups such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek—each competing to build leading AI models.

Challenger nations such as France and Canada are also investing heavily in AI. Both have launched national AI strategies and are building enabling infrastructure like data centers. Companies such as Mistral (France) and Cohere (Canada) have emerged as national champions, supported by their respective governments.

Meanwhile, new and emerging players—including South Korea, the UAE, and the UK—are accelerating investments in open-source AI to make AI development more accessible and to foster the growth of their local AI ecosystems. South Korea’s SOLAR-10.7B and the UAE’s Falcon-180B, for example, are designed to support local language large language models (LLMs) and aim to become dominant players in their respective regions.