Global Growth of Regional Large Language Models (LLMs)

When you think of a large language model (LLM), you probably picture the big household names like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama. They're dominant players for a reason – delivering cutting-edge performance that sets the standard for general-purpose AI – but they're also overwhelmingly centered around the English language and Western culture.

If you look further, there are plenty of other models gaining traction globally. Fueled by government investment as well as tech giants, startups, and research labs, these regional LLMs are trained on local languages and optimized for diverse needs.

With that in mind, let's take a look at some examples from around the world.

Middle East: Arabic-First AI

Across the Middle East, government partnerships and large-scale investments are driving the rapid expansion of the region's AI sector. Much of this effort is focused on Arabic-first and bilingual LLMs designed for regional sovereignty and cultural awareness. For instance, the following are some of the leading projects in the region:

• Jais offers open bilingual models up to 30B parameters, trained on large Arabic-English datasets, with the ability to switch between Arabic dialects. Instruction-tuned "Chat" variants, optimized for conversational applications, have also been released.

• ALLaM powers Saudi Arabia's popular HUMAIN Chat conversational assistant and emphasizes Arabic fluency and cultural nuance. Its series of models is designed to support the ecosystem of Arabic Language Technologies (ALT).

• Falcon, Abu Dhabi's flagship open LLM series, ranges from 7B to 180B parameters and combines commercially permissive licensing with strong performance that prioritizes resource efficiency – making it popular for academic, commercial, and government uses.

Asia-Pacific: Scale, Localization, and Linguistic Diversity

The AI ecosystem in the Asia-Pacific region spans the largest and most linguistically diverse populations in the world. Both government-backed initiatives and major tech firms are creating models that serve dozens of languages and dialects while delivering performance that in many cases stands on par with the most advanced models worldwide.

• DeepSeek, one of the most capable open-source models to emerge from China, uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to balance accuracy and computational efficiency. It offers more fluent support for Asian languages, with cultural nuance that may be missed by Western-centric models.

• Qwen, developed by Alibaba, covers 119 languages and dialects, with specialized multimodal variants and built-in support for Model Context Protocol. It features hybrid "thinking" and "non-thinking" modes for flexible reasoning – and you can even set a "thinking budget" to control how much computational effort it devotes to reasoning versus how quickly it replies.

• tzusumi is a lightweight Japanese LLM (0.6B and 7B parameters) designed for on-prem use, offering strong Japanese-language processing and multimodal support with minimal hardware requirements.

• Solar Pro 2 offers frontier performance in a comparatively compact 31B model, with multilingual capabilities and standout fluency in Korean. It's designed for real-world agent-like workflows across domains.

• SeaLLM is a multilingual model built for Southeast Asia that outperforms most open-source LLMs across domains like science, physics, and economics in the languages of the region. Notably, it supports non-Latin scripts and low-resource languages like Lao and Khmer.

Europe: Responsible AI and Data Sovereignty

In Europe, AI development tends to emphasize data sovereignty and compliance. The region has produced a number of LLMs that serve multilingual users and align with the EU AI Act and GDPR while competing with U.S. and Asian counterparts in raw performance.

• Mistral, developed in France, offers a suite of open and proprietary models for reasoning, multimodal, coding, and other applications, including its flagship Mistral Large 2 and the open-source Devstral family – and even a multilingual chatbot called Le Chat that boasts deep research and image editing capabilities.

• Luminous by Aleph Alpha is a multilingual model family (13B–70B parameters) built for enterprise and sovereign-AI use. It emphasizes compliance and transparency and provides support for English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish. The company also offers Pharia, a newer generation of models designed for concise, length-controlled responses.

• BLOOM is a 176 billion-parameter open-access model produced through a year-long volunteer research effort to provide a transparent alternative to proprietary AI models. It can generate text in 46 natural languages and 13 programming languages.

Other Regions: Emerging Innovation

Outside the major AI centers, new regional efforts are gaining momentum. For instance, Latam-GPT is an open initiative by Chile's nonprofit CENIA to develop a collaborative AI model completely within and for Latin America – trained on regional data and languages. The project's goal is to advance technological independence and cultural representation across the region.

In Africa, InkubaLM (named after the IsiZulu term for a dung beetle) addresses the need for lightweight African-language models. Trained on English and French as well as five African languages – Hausa, Swahili, IsiXhosa, IsiZulu, and Yoruba – the compact 0.4B-parameter model delivers efficient natural-language capabilities without heavy compute demands.

These projects reflect how emerging regional players are similarly building language models that prioritize inclusion and linguistic diversity, broadening the reach of global AI innovation.

How to Choose a Regional LLM

Choosing a regional model depends on your goals and infrastructure. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind:

• Look for open-weight models if you're prioritizing sovereignty or on-prem use.

• Pick the right model size for your infrastructure! Many regional LLMs offer compact variants.

• Consider dialect coverage and code-switching capabilities (e.g., training on colloquialisms) – along with nuanced cultural awareness – for social and chat applications.

• If your use case requires meeting strict data protection and compliance standards, EU-built models developed with these priorities in mind may be ideal.

Once you've found the right fit, the next step is putting these models to work!

The Bottom Line

Regional LLMs reflect how AI is evolving across a global spectrum of languages, cultural norms, regulatory priorities, and specialized technical needs.

Ultimately, they represent a more inclusive approach to model development. In turn, this helps bridge the AI gap for underrepresented groups worldwide. For developers and organizations, these LLMs provide context-aware and culturally fluent performance that's both versatile and cost-efficient.

With platforms like Vast.ai, you don't need massive in-house infrastructure to take full advantage of these models. Our affordable cloud GPU rental makes it easy to train, fine-tune, and deploy regional LLMs at scale – helping you find just the right fit for your use case and bring AI closer to the communities and markets you serve.

Start experimenting with regional LLMs on Vast.ai today!