As China attempts to move beyond using domestic chips solely for model inference, food delivery giant Meituan has released what it claims is the country’s first trillion-parameter artificial intelligence model trained entirely on home-grown hardware.

The Beijing-based on-demand service giant on Tuesday open-sourced LongCat-2.0, a new large language model (LLM) boasting 1.6 trillion parameters and a context window of 1 million tokens. The scale puts it on par with DeepSeek’s latest flagship model, V4-pro, which launched in April.

While DeepSeek-V4-pro relied on home-grown chips only for inference – the process where a pre-trained model runs to answer user queries – LongCat-2.0 used domestic hardware for both inference and pre-training, according to Meituan.

Pre-training is a far more computationally intensive process, during which an AI model digests massive data sets to learn basic patterns.

Meituan said LongCat-2.0 was built entirely on “large-scale clusters of tens of thousands of AI ASIC superpods”, showing its ability to “conduct frontier-scale training on alternative hardware platforms”. An ASIC, or application-specific integrated circuit, is a chip customised for specific workloads, as opposed to a general-purpose processor.

While Meituan did not explicitly name its hardware supplier, the company said in a WeChat post on Tuesday that it used the Huawei Collective Communication Library (HCCL) to improve training stability. HCCL is a chip-to-chip communication system similar to the Nvidia Collective Communication Library (NCCL).