Chinese food delivery giant Meituan has built and trained a 1.6-trillion-parameter artificial intelligence model entirely on domestic chips, bypassing Nvidia hardware altogether.
Meituan claims that it is the country's largest AI system developed without Western processors, the South China Morning Post reported on Tuesday.
The Beijing-based company open-sourced the model, called LongCat-2.0, boasting 1.6 trillion parameters and a context window of one million tokens, putting it on par with DeepSeek's flagship V4-pro model launched in April, according to SCMP.
Full Training Cycle On Chinese Hardware
Meituan said LongCat-2.0 was the industry's first trillion-parameter model to complete both pre-training and inference entirely on a 50,000-card domestic computing cluster, the report said.
While DeepSeek-V4-pro used home-grown chips only for inference, Meituan's model reportedly relied on Chinese hardware for pre-training as well, a far more computationally demanding process in which a model learns from massive datasets.
The company said the model was built on large-scale clusters of AI application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), chips customised for particular workloads rather than general-purpose processors.
Though Meituan did not name its supplier, it disclosed using Huawei's Collective Communication Library to improve training stability, according to the report.
Meituan said LongCat-2.0 outperformed Google's older Gemini 3.1 Pro on several coding and agentic benchmarks, though it trailed global frontier models including OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude 4.8 Opus.
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Steep Hurdles Remain
Despite the milestone, Meituan acknowledged persistent challenges in moving away from Nvidia's ecosystem, noting that its domestic accelerators carried significantly less memory per device than Nvidia's export-banned H800 chip.
The company said memory was the "primary bottleneck" in training on its 50,000-chip cluster, requiring extensive optimisation to build stable infrastructure.
The breakthrough comes as Beijing pushes for technology self-reliance amid continued US export restrictions on advanced semiconductors to Chinese firms.
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