Meituan's LongCat-2.0: China's Food Delivery Giant Builds Massive AI Model Without Any Foreign Chips

China's food delivery giant Meituan, often compared to DoorDash, has stunned the AI world by unveiling LongCat-2.0, a massive open-source large language model trained entirely without a single foreign chip. 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.

A Trillion-Parameter Leap Built on Domestic Hardware

The Beijing-based on-demand service giant open-sourced LongCat-2.0, a new large language model boasting 1.6 trillion parameters and a context window of 1 million tokens, putting it on par with DeepSeek's latest flagship model, V4-pro. Meituan claimed that LongCat-2.0 was the industry's first trillion-parameter model to complete full-process training and inference on a 50,000-card domestic computing power cluster, while DeepSeek-V4-pro relied on home-grown chips only for inference.

LongCat-2.0 is a Mixture-of-Experts model, meaning it doesn't fire all 1.6 trillion parameters every time it processes text. Instead, it dynamically activates roughly 33 billion to 56 billion parameters per token, making it far more efficient than a dense model of comparable size. Meituan said LongCat-2.0 was built entirely on "large-scale clusters of tens of thousands of AI ASIC superpods," demonstrating its ability to conduct frontier-scale training on alternative hardware platforms.

How It Stacks Up Against Global AI Leaders

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. It outperformed Google's older Gemini 3.1 Pro on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and SWE-Bench Pro, though the model still trails global frontier systems like OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Opus 4.8 across the most demanding agentic and reasoning tasks.

On benchmarks, the model posted a score of 59.5 on SWE-bench Pro and 70.8 on Terminal-Bench, evaluation suites designed to test how well AI models handle real-world software engineering challenges. The model weights and associated resources are publicly available on Hugging Face under the meituan-longcat organization. For full technical coverage of the release, see the original report from South China Morning Post.

China's Broader Push for AI Self-Sufficiency

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 US 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 US chipmakers, gaining market share through supply deals with AI developers.

US export controls have been systematically restricting China's access to cutting-edge AI chips since late 2022, yet Meituan trained a 1.6 trillion parameter model without any of the restricted hardware. Industry observers reacted immediately, with Lehigh University researcher Hanchi Sun calling it the first model ever trained to near-frontier performance on 50,000 Chinese domestic accelerators, and venture partner Alvin Foo noting that if China can scale frontier training on local silicon at this level, the compute arms race is wider open than ever.

From Food Delivery to Frontier AI

Meituan 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 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 a broader "agentic commerce" trend.

Every model trained successfully on domestic Chinese hardware weakens the leverage of US export controls. If Chinese companies can produce competitive frontier models without American chips, the primary tool the US has used to maintain its AI advantage starts looking like a strategy with a shelf life. As Meituan continues scaling its LongCat AI ecosystem alongside its core food delivery business, the release signals a broader shift in how China's tech giants are positioning themselves in the global AI race.