“Hey, are you raising a lobster?” This Monday morning as I walked into the office, my colleague asked me this question. He is not referring to the physical lobster that we eat as seafood. Rather, he is referring to the agentic artificial intelligence ( AI ) platform called OpenClaw that has gone viral in China in recent weeks.

OpenClaw, with a lobster avatar as part of its logo, is nicknamed “lobster”; and “to raise a lobster” means to deploy and function OpenClaw in one’s device or cloud server. “Raising a lobster” has become a trendy tagline on Chinese social media.

OpenClaw is a free and open-source autonomous AI project that was first founded by Austrian coder Peter Steinberger and debuted in November 2025. OpenClaw, described on its website as “the AI that actually does things”, can perform tasks for its users, such as sending email and managing calendars and flight check-ins.

Being agentic is what differentiates OpenClaw from other AI chatbots that can only talk. In just a few months, it has become the fastest-growing open-source software project ever on giant coding platform GitHub.

Line-ups in China to ‘raise a lobster’

“The AI that actually does things” sounds like a dream come true; and, OpenClaw is not error-free. There are reported cases that it messes up authorized tasks, such as deleting important emails without prior notification when it is allowed to control a user’s mailbox. More severe problems include privacy leakage and large-scale token breaches. Experts strongly advise against deploying OpenClaw directly on one’s main computer due to significant security and stability risks.

Despite all the associated risks, Chinese internet users show particular interest in this new AI assistant, and the zeal is not just contained among the coder/programmer community. Many in China with no technical specialty are upskilling to test this new AI agent. Over the weekend in Shenzhen, hundreds of people lined up in front of the Chinese tech giant Tencent’s office building, according to numerous social media posts, to “raise their own lobster” under the free guidance of Tencent’s volunteers.

The long queue for deploying OpenClaw is just another example that people in China are keeping an open mind when it comes to AI. In fact, China leads the world in being receptive to AI usage, according to a recent poll conducted by the public relation agency Edelman, with 54% of Chinese respondents saying they would embrace AI, versus just 10% rejecting it.

Such a positive attitude towards AI demonstrates that they are way ahead of those in developed countries like the US, UK and Germany. Chinese are also very confident about their AI literacy, with 67%, KPMG research finds, stating that they feel they have the skills and knowledge to use AI appropriately.

The Chinese government is also showing a welcoming stance towards this AI assistant. On March 8, Shenzhen Longgang district government released a draft policy for public consultation that supports the development of OpenClaw and similar AI agents.

The measures propose creating “Lobster Service Zones” to provide free deployment services, offering subsidies of up to 2 million yuan ( US$ 289,482 ) and ensuring access to computing power, application scenarios and talent resources. The Shanghai and Wuxi governments quickly caught up by releasing similar supportive measures.

Rise of agentic AI and the compute vacuum

Deploying OpenClaw is free; however, interacting with it is not. To make it capable of performing tasks, one needs to connect it to the large language models ( LLMs ), such as Claude, Gemini or DeepSeek; and it relies on these models to think and react, a process that consumes volumes of tokens, which need to be purchased from service providers. The bill from service providers can easily add up to hundreds of dollars per day if the assigned tasks to OpenClaw are complicated.

The massive influx of OpenClaw users creates business opportunities for Chinese tech giants, such as Alibaba and Tencent, who offer cloud services and LLMs to users for OpenClaw deployment and functioning. Tencent, it says, supports OpenClaw deployment within mainstream instant messaging platforms, including QQ and WeCom ( WeChat for corporates ), to grab the rocketing “lobster raiser” business in China.

The opportunities extend beyond software and cloud providers. Hardware manufacturers, semiconductor firms and data centre operators are positioning themselves to capture exploding demand from agentic AI workloads. Financial service providers in China are also testing OpenClaw’s capabilities in securities selection, financial statement analysis, etc.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, recently framed agentic AI as a watershed moment in computing history, describing OpenClaw as “the most important software release of our era”.

Intelligent agents, Huang argues speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference, represent a structural shift in how people interact with technology. Unlike traditional software, these agents can autonomously perform tasks that once demanded specialized expertise.

The consequence, the CEO warns, is a dramatic surge in computational demand: token consumption has spiked by nearly 1,000 times, creating what he termed a “compute vacuum”. In his view, no matter how vast current hardware deployments may be, they will remain insufficient as agentic AI continues to permeate professional and creative workflows.

The lobster fever is spreading, and I am going to get my lobster ready.