What happened in Alpha Arena
South China Morning Post detailed a live crypto trading face off run by US research firm Nof1 called Alpha Arena. The opening round wrapped up on Tuesday and featured six models: Alibaba Cloud's Qwen3-Max, China's DeepSeek V3.1 Chat, and four US-built systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and xAI.
Qwen3-Max delivered a 22.32% gain on a $10,000 stake across the first two weeks. Out of the six contenders, just two finished in the black. DeepSeek V3.1 Chat took the runner up spot with a 4.89% increase, while OpenAI's GPT-5 fared worst, dropping 62.66%.
Nof1 limited inputs to numeric market feeds, withholding news and any outside data. One twist: Qwen3-Max was the sole entrant without a reasoning feature, so it did not run step by step thought simulations before trading.
What Nof1 said about the results
Nof1 cautioned on its blog that the early outcomes "may be the result of luck". It added that future rounds would include "more statistical rigour". The group framed the goal this way: "If nothing else, we hope Alpha Arena highlights the power of evaluating AI in more consequential, realistic environments," and "We believe this is the fastest path to uncovering critical gaps and insights that move frontier AI forward."
Those comments position the contest as an ongoing trial with tighter methods coming as it progresses.
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How chip supply and politics fit into the picture
Alibaba is also moving faster on AI hardware. An August Wall Street Journal report said Alibaba has built a new AI chip described as more versatile than its earlier design. The prior chip was made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, while the new one was fabricated entirely in China and remains under test. It targets a broader range of AI inference work, meaning it is designed to run trained models more efficiently.
Financial Times reported that Chinese companies plan to lift the country's AI chip production to roughly three times current levels by 2026, a response to swelling demand for AI computing. The expansion is happening as frictions with the US on technology exports intensify. Earlier this year, the Trump administration blocked sales of Nvidia's H20 chips in China, and that prohibition was removed in July.
Subsequently, Chinese regulators voiced worries about possible "information leaks" and potential backdoor access in Nvidia hardware. According to the reports, regulators asked Tencent, ByteDance and Alibaba - among other large companies - to halt buying H20 chips, which in turn spurred local vendors to step in to meet demand. Companies named as ramping capacity include Huawei, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, MetaX, Cambricon Technologies and Alibaba.
The limits still in play
Despite the acceleration, the gap with top tier US chips remains wide. The Wall Street Journal was told by industry insiders that Chinese fabs still cannot make components as advanced as US offerings, which themselves face tight US export controls. Reuters reported that Nvidia's H20, the most capable chip currently permitted for China, trails the H100 and the Blackwell line. The lack of leading edge manufacturing continues to restrain efforts to catch up in high performance AI hardware.
What this means for your portfolio
The trading trial shows one model outperformed in a narrow, rules bound setting, while the organizer warned the lead "may be the result of luck" and promised "more statistical rigour" ahead. At the same time, China's chip push is real, from Alibaba's in country chip under test to a stated goal of tripling output by 2026, even as technology restrictions and capability gaps persist. The bottom line: keep an eye on how AI models perform in real conditions and on who can scale the compute behind them, because both shape who captures AI driven returns.
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