Hong Kong — DeepSeek, a Chinese technology startup that competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT, is gaining ground in many developing countries, a new report suggests, in a trend that could narrow the gap in artificial intelligence adoption with developed countries.
In a report on Thursday, Microsoft researchers said the global adoption rate of generative AI tools reached 16.3% of the world's population in the three months to December, up from 15.1% in the previous three months.
However, the gap in AI adoption between developed and developing countries is widening, with AI adoption in developed countries overall growing almost twice as fast as in developing countries, the report notes.
“We're seeing disparities, and we're concerned that they will continue to widen,” said Juan Lavista Ferrez, chief data scientist at Microsoft's AI for Good Lab. The lab used anonymized “telemetry” to track global device usage.
The report found that countries that invested early and consistently in digital infrastructure and AI led in terms of user share, including the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, France and Spain. Some of Microsoft's numbers overlap with a Pew Research Center survey released in October that showed which countries were more excited than concerned about AI. For example, in both reports, South Korea stood out in its adoption of AI.
While Microsoft is keenly interested in adopting AI, and its business and many in the tech industry and stock market are betting their futures on AI tools becoming more widely used and profitable, Lavista-Ferres said his lab is looking at the topic more broadly.
His researchers found that the rise of DeepSeek, a Chinese startup founded in 2023, is expanding the adoption of AI across the developing world, given its free and “open source” model (with key components that anyone can access and modify).
When DeepSeek released an advanced inference AI model called R1 in January 2025, which the company said was more cost-effective than a similar model in OpenAI, it raised eyebrows in the global technology industry and many were surprised that China was catching up to the US in technological advancement. In September, leading scientific journal Nature published a peer-reviewed study co-authored with DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng, calling it a “groundbreaking paper” by the Chinese startup.
Lavista Ferres said DeepSeek is a “good model” for tasks like math and coding, but that it works differently than U.S.-based models when it comes to topics like politics.
“Of course, we observed that for certain types of questions, they follow the same kind of access to the internet as China,” he said. “That means there are questions, especially political questions, that have very different answers. That could affect the world in many ways.”
DeepSeek offers chatbots that are free to use on web and mobile, and also provides global access for developers to modify and build on its core engine. The lack of subscription fees “lowers the barrier for millions of users, especially in price-sensitive regions,” Microsoft's report said.
DeepSeek did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this report.
“The combination of openness and affordability has enabled DeepSeek to gain traction in markets that are underserved by Western AI platforms,” the report adds. “The rise of DeepSeek shows that global AI adoption is not only determined by model quality, but also by access and availability.”
Developed countries such as Australia, Germany and the United States are trying to restrict the use of deep seek, citing alleged security risks. Last year, Microsoft banned its own employees from using DeepSeek. According to the report, deep seek adoption rates remain low in North America and Europe, but have skyrocketed in its home country of China, as well as Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Belarus, where U.S. services face restrictions or have limited access to foreign technology.
In many places, DeepSeek's popularity has been correlated with it being the default chatbot on widely popular mobile phones made by Chinese technology companies such as Huawei.
According to the report, DeepSeek's market share in China is 89%. This is followed by Belarus at 56% and Cuba at 49%, both of which also have broader AI adoption rates. In Russia, its market share was approximately 43%.
In Syria and Iran, DeepSeek's market share reached approximately 23% and 25%, respectively, the report added. In many African countries, including Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Niger, DeepSeek's market share was between 11% and 14%.
“Open source AI could serve as a geopolitical tool, extending China's influence into regions where Western platforms cannot easily operate,” the report said.
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O'Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.
