OpenClaw is the fastest-growing software product of all time, and its growth is being aided by on-ground events in some parts of the world.
Tencent AI has posted on X about a public setup event it hosted at the entrance of its headquarters in China, where engineers from Tencent Cloud helped ordinary users — including people over 60 years old — install and configure OpenClaw, the viral open-source AI agent. “From retired aviation technical engineer to librarian, they’re looking forward to embrace AI agents,” the company wrote, adding: “Stay curious, stay digital.” When asked what they were installing, Tencent AI clarified simply: “Deployed OpenClaw on the cloud.”
The event is a striking image of just how broad OpenClaw’s appeal has become. OpenClaw, formerly known as Clawdbot and then Moltbot, was created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger and launched just a few months ago. It has since accumulated over 145,000 GitHub stars and drawn two million visitors in a single week. The agent runs on a user’s operating system and can autonomously manage emails, browse the web, schedule calendar entries, and interact with online services — all controlled through familiar messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.
Tencent’s decision to hold a physical installation event reflects how seriously Chinese Big Tech is treating the OpenClaw wave. Tencent Cloud, alongside Alibaba Cloud, ByteDance’s Volcano Engine, JD.com Cloud, and Baidu Intelligent Cloud, has launched one-click cloud deployment options for OpenClaw, allowing users to set up the agent without needing to configure local servers themselves. In just a few hours at Tencent’s headquarters event, hundreds of OpenClaw instances were deployed on Tencent Cloud servers, according to the company’s own WeChat account.
The demand was significant enough that Tencent had to cap the number of attendees. When one user commented asking if free installation slots would be available the following day, Tencent Cloud replied that all available slots for the day had been taken and that users would be notified about future events.
The enthusiasm for OpenClaw in China mirrors what has been seen in Silicon Valley, but with a distinctly local flavour. OpenClaw can be paired with Chinese-developed language models such as DeepSeek, and community-built connectors now integrate it with China’s three major enterprise messaging platforms — Feishu, DingTalk, and Tencent’s WeCom. On Chinese social media platforms like RedNote, tutorials and demos of OpenClaw have gone viral, often framed as a glimpse into a future where small teams can dramatically scale their output using autonomous agents.
What makes Tencent’s public setup event especially notable is the demographic it served. Getting non-technical users, let alone retirees, to set up a self-hosted AI agent that requires server configuration, model integration, and messaging platform connections is no small feat. Ordinarily, OpenClaw’s setup is considered a significant barrier for less tech-savvy users, involving Docker environments, SSH connections, and API key management. Tencent’s engineers appear to have abstracted much of that complexity away through their cloud deployment service, handling everything from installation to model configuration and skill unlocking in a single session.
For Tencent, the business logic behind hosting such events goes beyond goodwill. As OpenClaw’s creator was being courted by both OpenAI and Meta for acquisition, China’s cloud giants were racing to lock users into their ecosystems. A user who deploys OpenClaw on Tencent Cloud today will likely continue using Tencent’s infrastructure for storage, bandwidth, and API calls for months or years to come. The free installation event is, in effect, a customer acquisition strategy dressed up as a community service — and a very clever one at that.
OpenClaw’s rise in China also points to a larger dynamic in the global AI race. Chinese tech firms have quickly moved beyond just building foundation models and are now positioning themselves as the infrastructure layer for the agentic AI era. Whether that bet pays off will depend on how quickly AI agents like OpenClaw move from enthusiast curiosity to everyday tool — and events like Tencent’s suggest that transition may be happening faster than most people expected.