As the 2026 Spring Festival holiday draws near, with just two weeks to go, the rivalry among leading tech firms has subtly but surely escalated. On February 1, Tencent's Yuanbao App rolled out a staggering 1 billion yuan red packet giveaway to celebrate the Spring Festival. By the time of reporting, the app had leapfrogged ByteDance's Doubao in the Apple Store's free app rankings, securing the coveted number-one position.

If the red packet campaigns of yore were primarily viewed as marketing ploys to "buy traffic with cash," the 2026 Spring Festival red packet extravaganza has transformed into a strategic maneuver centered on artificial intelligence (AI), with the goal of capturing the next wave of traffic entry points. The four tech behemoths—Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, and ByteDance—have each poured in resources worth hundreds of millions of yuan, propelling AI into a fresh phase of ecological rivalry.