Spend a billion yuan (US$140 million) on advertising in a single month. Then do it again the next. This isn’t a hypothetical; it’s the operational reality of China’s AI war in mid-2025. Alibaba’s Quark and Tencent’s Yuanbao are engaged in a marketing blitz so intense it makes the early-2010s ride-hailing subsidies look quaint. They are pouring capital into a bonfire with a simple, brutal goal: acquire users at any cost.
From the outside, this looks like another chapter in the global AI arms race—a costly battle to see who can build a better chatbot. But that’s a fundamental misreading of the situation. This isn’t a fight to win search; it’s a fight for what comes after search. The tech giants are burning cash not to build a more efficient information portal, but to seize control of the next-generation operating system for daily life—an integrated “Do-Engine” so powerful and convenient that it makes the traditional search box, and the fragmented app ecosystem it supports, completely obsolete.
This is a war driven by existential fear and fueled by unprecedented ambition. The goal is to forge the ultimate form of ecosystem lock-in, creating a conversational OS so deeply embedded in a user’s life that switching becomes unthinkable. The astronomical cost and uncertain path to profitability reveal the deepest anxieties and grandest strategic bets of China’s most powerful technology companies. This is not just about the future of AI; it’s about the future of the internet itself.
Farewell to the Ten Blue Links: The Rise of the ‘Do-Engine’
For two decades, the internet’s front door was a simple text box. You typed in keywords, and it gave you a list of links. Google perfected this model, building a trillion-dollar empire on the business of referral traffic. But in China, that model is now being systematically dismantled.
