By Ethan Wang and Eduardo Baptista
BEIJING, June 30 (Reuters) – China’s food delivery giant Meituan said on Tuesday it had released and would open-source its next-generation LongCat large language model, claiming it is the world’s first trillion-parameter AI system trained and run entirely on a 50,000-chip cluster powered by Chinese-made processors.
Meituan, often compared to DoorDash, is a late entrant to China’s crowded and well-funded AI sector, where rivals include DeepSeek and ByteDance’s Doubao. The LongCat team, founded in 2023, only launched its first model late last year.
Although the company did not disclose how the new model, LongCat-2.0, will be integrated into its existing businesses, Meituan has used earlier versions to power in-app AI assistants that recommend restaurants and hotels and complete tasks such as ordering food and booking rooms, part of an “agentic commerce” trend rival Alibaba has accelerated this year.
Amid weak consumer sentiment and diminishing margins, Meituan may also be seeking to diversify revenue streams. In a statement on LongCat’s official WeChat account, the company highlighted the model’s ability to build a gaming website and write a novel.
SELF-SUFFICIENCY FOCUS
LongCat-2.0’s reliance on Chinese AI chips underscores the growing importance of self-sufficiency in China’s domestic AI market, as DeepSeek, Alibaba, ByteDance and other major players work to reduce dependence on U.S. chips to train their models, following export controls imposed by Washington since 2022.
Chipmakers, including Huawei and Enflame, have moved quickly to fill the gap left by U.S. chipmakers, gaining market share through supply deals with AI developers.
LongCat-2.0 was trained from scratch using 50,000 domestic chips and can process inputs of up to 1 million tokens, allowing it to handle ultra-long documents, according to the statement.
The model is aimed at agentic coding, with its architecture designed to help it handle real-world coding tasks more efficiently and reliably.
A preview version of the model had already become one of the three most-used models on OpenRouter, a globally popular AI marketplace, the company said.
LongCat-2.0 matched or exceeded several leading proprietary models, including Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus, on some coding and agent benchmarks, Meituan claimed.
“LongCat-2.0 has demonstrated that we now have the capability to train large-scale models on domestic computing clusters,” the Chinese tech giant said, without naming the chipmaker.
(Reporting by Ethan Wang and Eduardo Baptista, Editing by Louise Heavens)
