New Delhi, July 9 -- The rapid emergence of smaller, cheaper and increasingly capable AI models is unlikely to curb global spending on AI infrastructure-If anything, it may accelerate it, according to Jefferies. In its new report, the brokerage cited the launch of Chinese AI company Z.ai's GLM-5.2 model as "another DeepSeek moment", arguing it intensifies competition among AI developers while sharply reducing the cost of inference-the process of running trained models to generate outputs from new data.

Many of these low-cost AI models like DeepSeek and GLM are open-weight versus the proprietary models. That said, open-weight models like Meta's Llama and Mistral AI are not open-source since they only release the trained model, but not nec...