Alibaba has dropped more than $450 million on free boba tea, digital coupons, and giveaways, launching one of China’s most extravagant marketing stunts yet as it races to dominate the global Artificial Intelligence market.
The campaign, rolled out during the Lunar New Year holiday, pushed users to interact with Alibaba’s Qwen AI chatbot, offering free milk tea and vouchers in exchange for voice commands.
Within nine hours, consumers placed over 10 million orders, overwhelming delivery platforms and briefly crashing parts of the system.
The scale of the giveaway underlines the brutal competition now gripping China’s AI sector, where tech giants are spending aggressively to lock in users before business models fully mature.
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Alibaba’s rivals are matching the tactics as Tencent handed out 1 billion yuan ($140 million) in digital red packets through its Yuanbao chatbot. At the same time, ByteDance leveraged China’s Spring Festival Gala to promote Doubao, its own AI assistant.
Whoever controls user habits, data, and developer ecosystems today could shape the next decade of global AI leadership.
$53bn bet on AI dominance
Behind the giveaways lies global AI dominance, a much larger ambition. Alibaba has already pledged over $53 billion in AI and cloud infrastructure spending, positioning itself to challenge US tech giants such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.
The company is investing heavily in large language models, data centres, AI chips, and cloud services, with a bet that AI will become the next operating system of the digital economy. The company aims to challenge US tech heavyweights, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Meta, turning China into a central battleground in the global AI race.
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However, monetisation remains uncertain because Chinese consumers are reluctant to pay for AI services, forcing firms into costly user-acquisition wars that risk eroding profitability.
This is while Western firms pursue subscriptions and enterprise licensing.
For now, Alibaba is betting that free boba tea today could translate into long-term platform loyalty tomorrow.
