The year 2026 has witnessed the meteoric rise of a project codenamed "OpenClaw," captivating global attention at a phenomenal pace. Its journey spans from rapidly accumulating GitHub stars and breaking through geek circles to becoming a mainstream phenomenon of "raising shrimp," from dominating social media trends to triggering a wave of limit-up rallies for related concept stocks in secondary markets, culminating in a significant endorsement at NVIDIA's GTC conference. In an exceptionally short time, it has transitioned from a niche open-source project to a central narrative in the industry. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang further heightened market sentiment yesterday by stating unequivocally that OpenClaw is "absolutely the next ChatGPT."

Today, the AI industry is experiencing a powerful convergence of two major catalysts: Alibaba Cloud officially announced price increases of up to 34% for AI computing power, directly addressing the revolution in token consumption triggered by OpenClaw. Concurrently, NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang, at GTC 2026, gave a strong endorsement, defining OpenClaw as the "operating system" for Agent computers and introducing NemoClaw to provide enterprise-grade security. The synergy of these two events is transforming the "OpenClaw craze" from a technological trend into a core force reshaping the landscape of China's AI industry. Propelled by this dual positive news, computing power-related stocks in the A-share and Hong Kong markets surged in the afternoon session, with significant gains for MINIMAX-WP, KINGSOFT CLOUD, and Zhipu AI.

**I. Origin and Explosion: The Meteoric Rise of an Open-Source "Crawfish"** * November 2025: Austrian developer Peter Steinberger (founder of PSPDFKit) initiated a personal project initially named Clawdbot. It was positioned as a local-first, open-source AI agent framework, with the core capability of upgrading large language models from "answering questions" to "autonomously executing tasks," enabling automated operations across different software and APIs. * December 2025: The project was quietly launched on GitHub, initially circulating only within small geek communities, with a slow climb in stars. * January 27: Due to a trademark conflict, the project was renamed Moltbot. During a brief 10-second gap, scammers registered the name and issued a token, sparking minor controversy. * January 28: A second renaming occurred, finalizing the name OpenClaw to emphasize its open-source nature, leading to rapidly growing community acceptance. * January 30: The official lobster virtual形象 was established, giving birth to the "raising shrimp" meme. * February 5: Chinese language adaptation was completed, with support for integration into WeChat, DingTalk, and Feishu, marking the official start of its domestic spread. * February 24: GitHub stars surpassed 100,000, exceeding the growth rates of classic projects like Linux, Vue, and React. * March 1: Stars reached 252,000, topping the chart for the fastest growth rate in GitHub history. * March 6: Nearly a thousand people queued outside Shenzhen's Tencent headquarters to install OpenClaw, an offline event that ignited widespread online discussion. * March 16-17: Receiving major endorsement at NVIDIA's GTC 2026 conference, OpenClaw evolved from a viral public phenomenon into a strategic, industry-level direction.

**II. Understanding OpenClaw Risks Through the "Usage Ban Wave"** As OpenClaw gained rapid popularity due to its disruptive "one-click operation" capability, a concurrent "ban wave" swept across industries—universities, financial institutions, and tech companies successively issued prohibitions against installing it on work devices and core servers. This phenomenon reflects the concentrated emergence of security vulnerabilities, compliance boundaries, and ecosystem competition during the early stages of AI Agent technology deployment, highlighting the profound challenges as artificial intelligence transitions from the "dialogue era" to the "execution era."

Despite the usage bans triggered by OpenClaw's high permissions, security vulnerabilities, and compliance risks, leading entities like NVIDIA, cloud providers, and application service providers continue to increase their investments, clearly optimistic about its long-term prospects as a benchmark framework for AI agents. This strategy of "implementing risk controls while expanding布局" reflects the industry's firm conviction in the shift of AI from interactive dialogue to autonomous execution, also confirming that OpenClaw is becoming core infrastructure for the next generation of AI implementation.

**III. Computing Power Shortage is Industry Consensus; OpenClaw is Not a Short-Term Trend** As OpenClaw's popularity extends beyond core tech circles, the capital market required a "more concrete signal": Is this a fleeting trend or a long-term shift? GTC provided a clear narrative framework. Jensen Huang's statements during GTC were highly elevating: he compared OpenClaw to Windows in the PC era, Linux for data centers, Kubernetes in the cloud era, and HTML for the web era, calling it the "operating system for personal AI" and emphasizing that "every company needs an OpenClaw strategy." In his latest remarks, he further positioned it within a familiar reference point—stating it is "absolutely the next ChatGPT."

This statement is significant because ChatGPT not only transformed the AI industry but also altered the narrative within capital markets: it made AI a mass-market product for the first time, quickly spilling over into multiple industry chain segments such as computing power, cloud services, software, and security. By placing OpenClaw in the position of the "next ChatGPT," Huang is essentially telling the market that the next universal AI entry point might not be a chatbox, but rather an intelligent agent system capable of executing tasks.

Alibaba Cloud's price hike announcement also serves as a direct market signal. While superficially attributed to exploding global AI demand and rising supply chain costs, the underlying driver is the surge in token calls caused by OpenClaw—its single agent makes hundreds of model calls per day, increasing token consumption by orders of magnitude compared to traditional AI chat applications. Alibaba Cloud's MaaS platform, Bailian, also recorded its highest-ever growth rate, with computing resources fully倾斜 towards token-based services. This is not an isolated case; market information suggests Tencent and Baidu are also considering raising token prices, indicating that computing power shortage has become an industry consensus.

Institutions like UBS and Barclays uniformly believe that this industrial transformation sparked by OpenClaw will usher Chinese tech giants into a new cycle of benefits across the entire industry chain. Infrastructure layer players like Alibaba and KINGSOFT CLOUD become direct beneficiaries of the computing power shortage. Large model layer companies like MINIMAX-WP and Zhipu AI capitalize on the token红利. Application layer giants like Tencent and Baidu leverage their gateway advantages to seize the initiative in SaaS-ification.

Disclaimer: All information presented does not constitute investment advice. The stock market involves risks, and investments should be made cautiously.