By Raffaele Huang

SINGAPORE -- This year's Lunar New Year holiday is turning into China's version of the Super Bowl: an annual event taken over by artificial-intelligence companies' marketing.

With the year of the horse beginning Tuesday, AI developers are offering free tea, free use of cars and even robots in promotions aimed at locking in users.

As in the U.S., companies in China believe that if they can secure a big user base now -- even at the cost of money-losing giveaways -- they will end up as winners in the AI era.

"Existing [internet] leaders have to defend their moat in the AI race, or risk being overthrown," said Laila Khawaja, a research director at research firm Gavekal Technologies.

A similar dynamic played out in this year's Super Bowl, when many AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic spent millions of dollars on advertising.

Chinese tech giants have long used the weeklong Lunar New Year holiday as a prime window for aggressive user-acquisition campaigns. But with more than 600 million users of generative AI already among China's 1.4 billion population, the window is closing fast to acquire new customers.

Alibaba has committed more than $430 million to a campaign offering free bubble tea and other items to users who order food through its Qwen chatbot. More than 120 million orders were made through the app in the six days after the promotion started, Alibaba said.

The company has integrated its e-commerce, payment and travel services into the chatbot so people can simply state what they want rather than clicking through menus.

Wu Weihua, a 34-year-old banker in China's southern city of Shenzhen, downloaded Qwen and got a free salad from a nearby restaurant last week. He said he would try to buy air tickets and groceries using the chatbot.

"If the service seems reliable and works pretty much on its own, I'd definitely be willing to use it more," Wu said.

TikTok parent ByteDance promoted its Doubao chatbot app by advertising 100,000 prizes through lucky draws, including the right to use a humanoid robot or an electric car from Audi or Mercedes through the end of the year.

ByteDance and Alibaba timed the promotions to the release of their latest flagship AI models, Seed 2.0 and Qwen 3.5, respectively. Both said their new models understand visual data better than their predecessors and have enhanced reasoning capabilities.

The Chinese companies are stressing that the AI bots can do practical work, a similar pitch to the ChatGPT Super Bowl commercial that portrayed a South Carolina peanut farmer using the app to keep harvest records. ByteDance also released a video-generation model that has drawn a backlash over copyright issues.

The crowded Chinese chatbot field also includes Tencent and Baidu, both of which are handing out lucky money to their AI users, and Hong Kong-listed AI startups Zhipu AI and MiniMax.

"In the short term, any user acquisition is likely not going to be sustainable since most AI functions are free and the cost of switching is low," said Khawaja, the Gavekal research director. The game-changer, she said, would come if a company could differentiate itself with a must-have product.

The AI promotions have drawn the attention of Chinese authorities, who have grown concerned about the race-to-the-bottom competition known as involution, which is blamed for leading to economic malaise. On Friday, China's market regulator urged the country's biggest internet companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance, to avoid "involution-style" competition.

Since DeepSeek's low-cost R1 model rattled Wall Street a year ago, Chinese labs have narrowed the performance gap with American leaders to just a few months. Some of the Chinese models are open-source, meaning they are free to download and use. Chinese models were one-sixth to one-fourth the cost of U.S. rivals, the nonprofit research group Rand said in a January report.

OpenAI said last week that it found evidence DeepSeek was using unfair methods to extract results from leading American AI models to train its own. It accused its Chinese rival of trying "to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other U.S. frontier labs."

Write to Raffaele Huang at raffaele.huang@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 16, 2026 23:00 ET (04:00 GMT)

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