The Spring Festival in 2026 has evolved beyond a mere consumer spending spree, transforming into a high-stakes race among China's AI giants for dominance in the "mobile gateway."

According to analysis, JPMorgan stated in a research report released on February 11th that China's internet and AI sector is experiencing its most concentrated wave of flagship model releases in history. This is no longer a solo performance by a single model, but a game of musical chairs centered on who can most rapidly translate "technological spillover" into a "consumer-grade blockbuster."

A Crowded "Spring Festival Release Season" DeepSeek's tactical surprise launch during the 2025 Spring Festival has become an industry case study. In 2026, everyone has adopted this strategy.

Based on JPMorgan's observations, the market is once again prepared for a similar "holiday release season," but with a key difference: "This time it's not a single standout; we see numerous pending flagship and near-flagship updates converging into the same window."

ByteDance made the first move, unveiling a trio of models: Seedance 2.0 (video), Seedream 5.0 (image), and Doubao 2.0. Among these, Seedance 2.0 has already shown signs of being a potential hit. Alibaba is not sitting idle, reportedly preparing to launch Qwen 3.5 in mid-February, accompanied by a 3 billion yuan incentive program to drive user acquisition. Knowledge Atlas released GLM-5 on February 11th, a model previously known under the codename "Pony Alpha," with its parameter scale expanding from 355 billion to 744 billion.

DeepSeek is reportedly targeting a mid-February release for its V4 version, focusing on improvements in coding and ultra-long prompt handling. Reports on February 11th indicated that DeepSeek had updated its model to support a context length of up to 1 million tokens.

MiniMax launched its latest large model, M2.5, on its Agent platform on February 11th.

JPMorgan stated directly that this clustering of releases will lead to a "winner-takes-all" scenario:

"When multiple models appear simultaneously, developers and enterprises intensify comparative testing... the adverse impact on underperformers is more pronounced."

During the Spring Festival window, where attention is scarce, if a lab cannot deliver a credible flagship update, it risks falling off developers' testing lists entirely.

"In the Spring Festival window, attention is scarce, yet in a sense, it is abundant: users will try more products, but they will also decide more quickly which ones they will continue using. This is why we view the Spring Festival period as a reset point on the scoreboard."

DeepSeek V4 and the Ambition for Cost Reduction The market's primary focus remains on DeepSeek. JPMorgan analysts pointed out that the core impact of DeepSeek's potential Spring Festival release lies not in the chatbot itself, but in the "platform economic effects" it might unleash. A recent DeepSeek paper, "Conditional Memory via Scalable Lookup," reveals its technical approach: improving quality by using "conditional memory" as a second sparse axis, without resorting to brute-force computational upgrades. The research report suggests that DeepSeek's technique of adding "conditional memory" alongside Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) could become key for the next generation of models. This is not merely about making models lighter; it involves shifting expensive dense computations to cheaper retrieval operations.

"If the technical implementation is as described in the paper, it would signify an efficiency improvement beyond simple model lightweighting; it effectively transfers part of the model's 'work' from expensive dense computation to cheaper retrieval/memory operations." "If it prioritizes efficiency and achieves inference cost reduction, then AI can be economically embedded directly into high-frequency consumer products, moving beyond standalone chatbots."

This implies that AI could transition from an expensive "toy" to a cheap "tool." If the unit cost of inference drops, spending more tokens on multi-step reasoning and tool execution becomes feasible, potentially accelerating the shift of China's AI adoption curve from "dialogue tools" towards AI being embedded within the highest-frequency product interfaces.

Who Wins? The Biggest Beneficiary Might Be TENCENT In this model war, JPMorgan presents a counter-intuitive argument: the biggest beneficiary might not be the model developers themselves, but TENCENT. The logic is clear: TENCENT owns WeChat and QQ, China's highest-frequency communication interfaces.

"We believe TENCENT is poised to be the biggest beneficiary of a potential new product release from DeepSeek... TENCENT has already begun integrating third-party model capabilities into core consumer gateways like WeChat and Yuanbao, increasing the likelihood that stronger model performance translates into tangible user experience improvements. If model quality improves significantly, we also expect TENCENT to gain greater confidence in broadly expanding and deepening AI functionality integration across its high-frequency communication interfaces, including QQ."

The situation is more complex for Alibaba and Baidu. On one hand, more powerful models can enhance user experience in their products (e.g., Taobao Q&A, Baidu Search); but on the other hand, if DeepSeek ignites another "price war," the entire industry's API services could face significant deflationary pressure.

"If newly released DeepSeek models demonstrate significant efficiency gains, we anticipate persistent price pressure on model API services across the industry, which could pressure short-term unit economics."

For vertical giants like Trip.com, Beike, and Kuaishou, JPMorgan views this as an unequivocal positive. Powerful open-source models lower their technical barriers, allowing them to fine-tune models using their proprietary data at a lower cost and accelerate product iteration.

Awaiting Validation of a Consumer AI "Blockbuster"

Despite market enthusiasm, JPMorgan maintains objective caution. Current demonstrations of "2C agents" often appear impressive, but practical deployment frequently faces consistency issues. The large-scale user testing during the Spring Festival will serve as a true litmus test.

"We share the market's current skepticism: many '2C agent' demonstrations remain inconsistent; consumer satisfaction often falls below expectations once users test them at scale on real-world tasks."

However, if the flagship models released during this Spring Festival season can genuinely solve reliability and latency issues in tool usage, an inflection point might truly arrive. As JPMorgan summarized: "The true signal of adoption is not the noise on launch day; it is whether established giants make AI a default feature of high-frequency interfaces, as this is what drives sustained inference demand."

Valuation Reset: Looking Towards 2030 Profitability Furthermore, regarding secondary market strategy, JPMorgan maintains "Overweight" ratings on pure-play model developers Knowledge Atlas and MiniMax. Knowledge Atlas's GLM-5 has achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) status in open-source Agent capabilities, ranking first in multiple evaluation benchmarks. MiniMax has achieved dual B2B/B2C commercialization with its full-spectrum models (text, video, audio). JPMorgan's valuation logic has skipped near-term losses, looking directly towards 2030 profitability:

Knowledge Atlas: Target price of HKD 400, based on 30 times the projected 2030 price-to-earnings ratio. MiniMax: Target price of HKD 700, based on 30 times the projected 2030 price-to-earnings ratio.

Analysts believe that as model capabilities approach the global frontier, the rationale for valuation upgrades will undergo a qualitative change:

"Valuation upgrades may become less about national pride and more focused on economic benefits: stronger willingness to pay, higher API workload retention rates."