Meituan's 1.6T-Parameter Bet: Domestic Chips Can Train Frontier AI
Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.0, a 1.6 trillion-parameter model it claims was trained entirely on a 50,000-card domestic ASIC cluster — a first for China at this scale. The model matches DeepSeek's V4-pro in parameter count and context window, but unlike DeepSeek, Meituan says it used homegrown chips for both training and inference. This breaks the assumption that restricting Nvidia exports throttles China's ability to build frontier models, not just run them. For PMs, the supply-chain risk calculus for AI infrastructure just shifted — and your vendor dependency audit probably hasn't caught up.