Meituan Unveils LongCat-2.0 AI Model Powered by Domestic Chips
Meituan, a prominent Chinese technology company, announced the release and open-sourcing of its next-generation LongCat large language model, LongCat-2.0. The company claims this trillion-parameter AI system is the first globally to be fully trained and operated on a 50,000-chip cluster utilizing domestically produced Chinese processors. This initiative positions Meituan as a relatively recent participant in China's competitive and well-resourced artificial intelligence sector, where established players include DeepSeek and ByteDance's Doubao. The LongCat team, established in 2023, introduced its initial model late last year.
Strategic Emphasis on Domestic AI Hardware
The reliance of LongCat-2.0 on Chinese AI chips highlights the increasing emphasis on self-reliance within China's domestic artificial intelligence market. Major industry participants, including DeepSeek, Alibaba, and ByteDance, are actively working to reduce their dependence on U.S.-made chips for training their models, a strategic shift influenced by export restrictions implemented by the United States since 2022. In response, Chinese chipmakers such as Huawei and Enflame have rapidly expanded their market presence, securing supply agreements with AI developers to address the demand created by these controls.
Technical Capabilities and Business Integration
LongCat-2.0 was developed from scratch using 50,000 domestic chips and possesses the capability to process inputs of up to 1 million tokens, enabling it to handle exceptionally long documents. The model is primarily designed for agentic coding, with an architecture optimized to manage real-world coding tasks more efficiently and reliably. While Meituan did not detail how LongCat-2.0 will be integrated into its current operations, earlier versions of the model have been deployed to power in-app AI assistants. These assistants recommend restaurants and hotels and facilitate tasks such as food ordering and room bookings, aligning with a broader trend toward AI-driven commerce that has been accelerated by competitors like Alibaba. Amid challenging consumer sentiment and narrowing profit margins, Meituan may also be exploring new revenue streams. A statement on LongCat's official WeChat account highlighted the model's potential to develop gaming websites and author novels.
Performance Benchmarks and Market Presence
Meituan stated that a preview version of LongCat-2.0 has already become one of the three most frequently used models on OpenRouter, a widely recognized global AI marketplace. The company further claimed that LongCat-2.0 reportedly matched or surpassed several established proprietary models, such as Google's Gemini, OpenAI's GPT-5.5, and Anthropic's Claude Opus, across various coding and agent performance metrics. This achievement, according to the Chinese technology company, demonstrates a robust capability to train large-scale models using domestic computing clusters.
