Meituan unveils LongCat-2.0, first trillion-parameter AI model trained on domestic chips

China's Meituan says new AI model trained on domestic chips

BEIJING, June 30 (Reuters) - China's food delivery giant Meituan (3690.HK), opens new tab 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 (9988.HK), opens new tab, 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. Ad Break Coming Up NEXT StayNext OffEnglish 180p288p360p480p540p576p720pHD1080pHDAuto (180p) About ConnatixV492702563 About ConnatixV492702563 1/1 Skip Ad Continue watchingafter the adVisit Advertiser websiteGO TO PAGE 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 Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Disrupted Eduardo Baptista Thomson Reuters Eduardo Baptista is a Senior Correspondent for Reuters based in Beijing, covering China's technology, space, and automotive industries. He has led enterprise and investigative reporting on China's military-linked companies, artificial intelligence and semiconductor supply chains, as well as macroeconomic and industrial policy. Baptista has reported from China for nearly a decade and holds a BA in History from the University of Cambridge.

China's Meituan says new AI model trained on domestic chips

Chinese tech firm Meituan launched a new artificial intelligence model on Tuesday that it said was the first of its size to be trained using domestically developed computer chips. The country is locked in a fierce race for AI dominance with the United States, which restricts exports to China of the most cutting-edge silicon chips designed by industry leader Nvidia. In response to Washington's restrictions, imposed on national security grounds, China has been accelerating efforts to develop its own advanced chips and break away from reliance on U.S. hardware. Meituan on Tuesday unveiled LongCat-2.0, a new large language model whose performance it says is comparable to Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro, released in February. LLMs are the kind of technology that underpins chatbots and many other AI tools. LongCat-2.0 is "the industry's first trillion-parameter model to complete end-to-end training and inference on a 50,000-chip domestic compute cluster," Meituan said in a statement. It did not disclose which Chinese chipmaker's products were used in the training process. The announcement marks a milestone for China's fast-developing AI industry because training competitive models with vast amounts of digital data requires chips with hefty computing power. Flagship models from other Chinese AI labs, including DeepSeek and Zhipu, can run inference on chips produced by domestic companies like Huawei -- a less intensive process than training. It is believed that most domestic models were trained using Nvidia chips. Some media reports have suggested that an unknown number of advanced Nvidia AI chips were smuggled into China. Meituan's AI research team began exploring the use of domestic chips in 2023 and "has proven that we are now capable of carrying out large-scale model training on domestic compute clusters," the company said.

China's Meituan says new AI model trained on domestic chips

Chinese tech giant Meituan has unveiled LongCat-2.0, a new AI model comparable to Google's Gemini 3.1 pro. This marks a significant achievement as it's reportedly the first trillion-parameter model trained entirely on domestically developed computer chips. This development is a crucial step for China in its pursuit of AI dominance amidst US chip export restrictions, showcasing their growing self-reliance in advanced hardware for AI development. Chinese tech firm Meituan launched a new artificial intelligence model on Tuesday that it said was the first of its size to be trained using domestically developed computer chips. The country is locked in a fierce race for AI dominance with the United States, which restricts the export to China of the most cutting-edge silicon chips designed by industry leader Nvidia. In response to Washington's restrictions, imposed on national security grounds, China has been accelerating efforts to develop its own advanced chips and break away from reliance on US hardware. Meituan on Tuesday unveiled LongCat-2.0, a new large language model whose performance it says is comparable to Google's Gemini 3.1 pro, released in February. LLMs are the kind of technology that underpin chatbots and many other AI tools. LongCat-2.0 is "the industry's first trillion-parameter model to complete end-to-end training and inference on a 50,000-chip domestic compute cluster", Meituan said in a statement. It did not disclose which Chinese chipmaker's products were used in the training process. The announcement marks a milestone for China's fast-developing AI industry, because training competitive models with vast amounts of digital data requires chips packing hefty computing power. Flagship models from other Chinese AI labs, including DeepSeek and Zhipu, can run inference on chips produced by domestic companies like Huawei -- a less intensive process than training. It is believed that most domestic models were trained using Nvidia chips. Some media reports have suggested that an unknown number of advanced Nvidia AI chips were smuggled into China. Meituan's AI research team began exploring the use of domestic chips in 2023 and "has proven that we are now capable of carrying out large-scale model training on domestic compute clusters", the company said.