Chinese AI developers race to attract users during Tet

Since nearly a month before the Lunar New Year, the Chinese technology market witnessed a large-scale “money burning” in the field of artificial intelligence. ByteDance, owner of TikTok, is one of the latest names to join the race. To put its Doubao model in a prominent position in the Tet television gala program, the company gave away 100,000 prizes, including high-end cars. In addition, ByteDance gives out lucky money with the highest amount of 8,888 CNY (about 33 million VND).

Baidu, a company likened to “Chinese Google”, also spent 500 million CNY (about 72 million USD) to promote its chatbot Ernie. Meanwhile, Tencent spent twice as much, with an amount of 1 billion CNY to promote users to use AI Yuanbao.

Previously, from early February, giant Alibaba also announced that it would spend 3 billion CNY (about 434 million USD) as gifts to attract users to experience Qwen during the Lunar New Year holiday. Users can receive incentives for dining, entertainment and relaxation, with “large red envelopes being given out continuously”. The company even admitted that it had to “urgently add resources” to continue competing with other competitors.

This year’s holiday in China begins on February 15 and lasts nine days, longer than most previous years. According to CNBCChinese AI firms are seeing this as a pivotal moment to attract AI-curious customers, while ensuring their own survival in this competitive period.

“They are engaged in a fierce race to attract users and build a developer ecosystem before competitors gain market dominance,” said Charlie Dai, principal analyst at research group Forrester. According to Dai, this takes place in a context where profitability and sustainable business models are still unclear for AI companies, even for large AI firms in the world.

Theo ReutersLunar New Year is the time when hundreds of millions of Chinese people go home for family reunions, and has long been likened to a marketing battleground to attract new users. One of the most successful campaigns was Tencent in 2015, leveraging the WeChat messaging app to distribute electronic red envelopes. This move saw its WeChat Pay service gain market share from Alipay, which was dominating China’s mobile payments market at the time.

Last year, the launch of the DeepSeek R1 model during the Lunar New Year also shook the global AI market, while promoting competition within domestic companies.

In addition to the gift-giving race, Chinese AIs also took this opportunity to launch their new, most powerful AI tools.ByteDance recently launched its Seedance 2.0 video creation model, designed for professional film production. A video created by this AI of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting quickly went viral and attracted attention in Hollywood, even acknowledged by Elon Musk that “it’s happening very fast”. Zhipu AI – the startup that worries OpenAI – launched a new AI model GLM-5 to compete with rivals such as Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in the field of programming. According to some rumors, Alibaba and DeepSeek are expected to launch a new AI model in mid-February