Primary school students show interest in a lantern in the shape of a humanoid robot at a lantern festival in Hefei, East China"s Anhui Province on January 12, 2026. Photo: VCG

　　With Alibaba"s artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Qwen kicking off a Spring Festival giveaway plan that distributes free milk tea cards, the competition for users among China"s major AI large-language model (LLM) companies is heating up and intensifying ahead of the Spring Festival.

　　Photos and videos of an explosion of orders at coffee and tea drink chains went viral on China"s social media platforms over the weekend, after the Qwen app on Friday launched a Spring Festival giveaway worth 3 billion yuan ($432 million), under which users were given 25 yuan no-threshold free milk tea gift cards that encourage them to place drink orders directly through the app"s chat interface.

　　The campaign has prompted a lot of discussion online, with many users posting photos showing that milk tea shops were overwhelmed by delivery workers.

　　In a post titled "Making the History of Global AI shopping," the Qwen app said on its WeChat account on Friday that the cards could also be used for other services, including breakfast, lunch, and dinner options, eggs, vegetables, fresh produce, daily groceries, snacks, Tmall Supermarket items, and even on-site supermarket purchases.

　　Driven by the huge campaign traffic, the Qwen app surged to No.1 in the China"s Apple App Store free chart on Saturday, followed by Tencent"s Yuanbao and ByteDance"s Doubao in second and third place respectively.

　　In addition to Qwen, other Chinese AI LLM companies including Baidu, Tencent and ByteDance have rolled out digital red envelope initiatives, with a total estimated value of more than 4.5 billion yuan.