China's tech titans are giving away $600 million in digital red envelopes
Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba are giving away 4.5 billion yuan in digital red envelopes for Spring Festival 2026.
It's their way of getting more people to try out their AI apps before launching new features—think of it as a massive user engagement push in China's fast-moving AI race.
Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba and ByteDance are all in
Tencent kicked things off with its Yuanbao app, offering up to 10,000 yuan per winner.
Baidu offered a 500 million yuan pool.
Alibaba joined on February 6 via its Qwen app, handing out a huge 3 billion yuan.
ByteDance secured an exclusive AI cloud partnership with CCTV's Spring Festival Gala.
Expect new AI models to drop during this festival season
Beyond cash giveaways, some of these companies are also dropping new AI models.
Alibaba says its Qwen3-Max-Thinking beats Google's latest at reasoning; Baidu launched its own model in January; DeepSeek released a low-cost model last year and made its system's inner workings public.
Bottom line: China's tech giants are going all-in on both rewards and innovation to win over users this festival season.