Alibaba's Qwen AI assistant has joined the Chinese New Year digital red-envelope race with a CNY3 billion (USD432 million) giveaway to promote its shopping features. Baidu launched a CNY500 million (USD71.9 million) giveaway and Tencent's Yuanbao a CNY1 billion one, while ByteDance's Volcano Engine will be the exclusive AI cloud partner for CCTV's New Year's Gala, with its Doubao AI tool to appear on the show.