An open-source AI agent software has sparked a nationwide &#34;lobster farming&#34; craze in China, astonishing the entire world.
A sales memo that flew out of Wall Street has presented the booming &#34;lobster farming&#34; scene in China to global investors. Philip Sun, a sales representative at Goldman Sachs Asia, wrote in the memo that almost everyone in China is now &#34;farming lobsters,&#34; and the speed and enthusiasm with which Chinese people are embracing AI is truly breathtaking.
He candidly stated in the memo: &#34;The Chinese AI company MiniMax has set a personal record for me—I have never seen an IPO increase by 740% in just two months.&#34; Philip Sun believes that the driving force behind this is closely related to the current &#34;lobster farming&#34; craze sweeping China.
Meanwhile, on the American Reddit forum, a post about the long line of installations outside Tencent's headquarters in Shenzhen received over a thousand likes, with the comments section filled with bewildered foreign netizens: &#34;This scale is insane, right?&#34;
<h2>Goldman Sachs Salesperson &#34;Breaks Down&#34;: Never Seen Such an IPO in His Life</h2>
On March 11, 2026, Philip Sun, a sales representative in Goldman Sachs (Asia) Global Banking and Markets, sent a memo to clients titled &#34;Train your own 'Lobsters'.&#34; The first sentence caused a stir in the entire market:
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&#34;MiniMax has created a personal record for me. I have done so many Asian IPOs, but I have never seen a stock increase by 740% in two months.&#34;
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The numbers are straightforward—MiniMax was listed at HKD 165 on January 9, 2026, and by March 11, it had traded up to HKD 1,220. In two months, a 740% increase. At the same time, another Chinese AI company, ZhiPu AI, was listed on January 8, with a two-month increase of 560%.
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(MiniMax weekly chart Source: Wind)
Philip Sun also specifically mentioned in the memo that they launched a management roadshow on December 29, and the last roadshow in Hong Kong at 3 PM on December 31 was still packed—despite it being New Year's Eve, people in the financial circle were meeting to grab projects.
This veteran who has seen countless Asian IPOs couldn't help but exclaim several times in the memo, using the phrase &#34;Quite amazing.&#34;
MiniMax is a company with an average employee age of 29, and its market value is now on par with Baidu.
<h2>Nearly a Thousand People Lined Up Outside Shenzhen, Just to Install a &#34;Lobster&#34;</h2>
What made Philip Sun so emotional is not just the stock price. The other scene he described in the memo is the real spectacle that has drawn global attention—
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Tencent employees set up stalls outside the headquarters in Shenzhen, offering to help passersby install OpenClaw on their computers for free
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What is OpenClaw? This is an open-source AI agent software developed by Austrian programmer Peter Steinberg, and its logo is a lobster.
Unlike ordinary chatbots, OpenClaw is designed to be a truly &#34;capable&#34; AI—it can help users clean their email, process files, write code, post on social media, and even automatically complete complex tasks 24/7.
Even Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, stated at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco: &#34;OpenClaw may be the most important single software release in history.&#34;
This &#34;lobster&#34; has made its way to China, instantly causing a stir.
At an event outside Tencent's headquarters in Shenzhen, nearly a thousand attendees included retired aerospace engineers, housewives, students, and various AI enthusiasts—having so many &#34;atypical users&#34; in one scene speaks for itself.
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Shanghai designer Mark Yang said that after using OpenClaw, he feels like he has a group of &#34;virtual employees,&#34; and many tasks no longer require his hands-on involvement.
Entrepreneur Fu Sheng even built an AI assistant called &#34;Sanwan&#34; based on OpenClaw during his recovery from a skiing injury over the Spring Festival:
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In 4 minutes, it sent New Year greetings to over 600 friends, and the social media posts he published had already garnered a million views after a nap. The website sanwan.ai was also designed, coded, and launched by Sanwan itself.
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His sentiment is: &#34;Human employees don’t respond immediately, but it’s different with it; you say it, and it moves right away.&#34;
Even Philip Sun from Goldman Sachs remarked that the young investors he interacts with in China already have several &#34;lobsters&#34; each:
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One is responsible for summarizing market news every morning, another analyzes whether investment decisions are too emotional, and there’s even a &#34;supervising lobster&#34; specifically tasked with overseeing the work of the other lobsters.
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The word he used was: Fascinating.
<h2>The &#34;Lobster Raising&#34; Craze: From Programmer Circles to Grandma and Grandpa Groups</h2>
The Chinese have given this phenomenon a down-to-earth name—&#34;raising lobsters.&#34;
In Beijing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou… from online to offline, various OpenClaw sharing sessions and installation events have sprung up like mushrooms after rain.
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At a friend-organized OpenClaw meetup in Hangzhou, there were too many people to enter, so they had to limit the flow; they decided to hold another session in Shenzhen, with over 900 registered participants. Some are selling installation services on Xiaohongshu and WeChat, with prices ranging from dozens to hundreds of yuan, yet demand still exceeds supply
What truly astonished foreigners is that this wave has broken down barriers among the crowd.
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On the American Reddit forum across the ocean, a user mentioned that his grandfather sends AI-generated greeting images to the family group every morning. Another user hit the nail on the head: &#34;You don't understand how accepted AI is in China.&#34;
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Some joked: &#34;It's a free event, the elderly will definitely go, even if they have no idea what it is.&#34;
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American user sean_hash lamented in the comments:
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&#34;From the announcement to the large-scale installation activities in Shenzhen, it only took 72 hours. This speed of deployment is hard to replicate elsewhere.&#34;
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After watching videos of Shenzhen lit up at night with everyone engaging in AI, a user directly broke down:
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&#34;As an American, you go see Shenzhen, then look at our Baltimore, it feels like we are living in two different centuries.&#34;
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A user from Vietnam said that Asia's attitude towards AI is generally positive, and seeing the enthusiasm in China, they are basically following suit.
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One user even commented: &#34;Should I start teaching my daughter to learn Chinese?&#34;
<h2>Why is it China?</h2>
On the surface, it seems like a nationwide celebration, but behind it, there is a clear logical chain.
First, the public narrative is different.
In China, AI is consistently defined as an opportunity for economic growth, written into the five-year plan, and appears in the government work report of the Premier of the State Council—this year's two sessions explicitly proposed &#34;promoting the accelerated application of new generation intelligent terminals and AI agents, encouraging large-scale commercialization of artificial intelligence in key areas.&#34; An observer pointed out that China's public narrative on AI is highly unified, whereas discussions about AI in the United States are more fragmented.
Western observers have an analysis on this: The generation in Europe and America grew up watching &#34;The Terminator&#34; and &#34;The Matrix,&#34; and the fear of machines overthrowing humanity has long been ingrained in their cultural genes; while the Chinese have personally experienced industrialization and urbanization transforming their lives from poverty to today, their instinctive reaction to new technology is &#34;it can make my life better.&#34;
Second, low cost and low threshold.
OpenClaw is open source, and Chinese cloud vendors have made deployment services &#34;one-click installation.&#34; Alibaba, ByteDance, and Baidu have all launched foolproof configuration solutions, while Tencent employees directly go out to set up stalls to help people install it. With high-cost performance domestic large models like Tongyi Qianwen and DeepSeek as the foundation, ordinary users do not need to understand code; they can start &#34;farming shrimp&#34; by scanning a QR code.
From GitHub repositories to mini-programs, this is a dimensionality reduction crush of life logic over technical logic.
Third, the integration speed of the platform ecosystem is unparalleled.
Enterprise WeChat, DingTalk, Feishu, Taobao—major platforms have almost simultaneously integrated the OpenClaw architecture. This means that &#34;farming lobsters&#34; is not just tinkering with an isolated tool but is directly embedded in the entry points of hundreds of millions of people's daily work and life.
Tencent is reportedly also developing AI agents specifically for integrating with WeChat mini-programs, competing head-on with Tongyi Qianwen and Doubao.
Fourth, local governments are offering large-scale subsidies to invite &#34;shrimp farmers.&#34;
According to an article from Wall Street Journal, cities like Shenzhen, Suzhou, and Hefei launched subsidy policies for the OpenClaw project within days of the trend emerging, building industrial parks and providing support funds to &#34;one-person companies.&#34;
A technology that, within days, has moved from the programmer community into government documents—this speed is hard to imagine anywhere else in the world.
<h2>This is not the first time, nor will it be the last</h2>
From shared bicycles to mobile payments, from live-streaming sales to today's &#34;farming lobsters,&#34; the &#34;standard template&#34; of China's tech ecosystem has never changed: not necessarily the first to invent, but definitely the first to achieve the largest scale, the fastest implementation, and the most aggressive commercialization.
Academics call this the &#34;second mover advantage&#34;—you don't have to burn money and step into pitfalls; when the technology matures, you can amplify it into infrastructure that changes the lives of billions with stronger execution and a more complete ecosystem.
OpenClaw is still more of a &#34;cool toy&#34; in geek circles in the West, but in China, it has become &#34;national infrastructure&#34; used by retired engineers, housewives, and students.
Goldman Sachs salespeople were surprised, Reddit users were dumbfounded, and Jensen Huang said on stage that this is &#34;the most important software ever,&#34; but few anticipated that the ones enjoying this lobster farming the most would be the common people of China.
The highest realm of technology has never been about self-appreciation in laboratories—it is about stepping into the hustle and bustle and changing the lives of billions.
This &#34;lobster&#34; storm has just begun, and the speed and enthusiasm of the Chinese people have already made the world hear the winds of the future roaring in

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The open-source AI intelligent software OpenClaw has sparked a nationwide "lobster farming" craze in China. Philip Sun from Goldman Sachs Asia stated that the speed and enthusiasm with which Chinese people embrace AI is astonishing. Outside Tencent's headquarters in Shenzhen, nearly a thousand people lined up for installation, with participants ranging from programmers to retired engineers and housewives. Related posts received over a thousand likes, and the comments section was filled with bewildered foreign netizens: This scale is insane, right?

- An open-source AI software called OpenClaw has sparked a nationwide "lobster farming" craze in China, catching global attention.  
- Goldman Sachs salesperson Philip Sun highlighted in a sales memo that MiniMax's IPO surged 740% in two months, reflecting the rapid adoption of AI in China.  
- This trend has permeated various demographics, with events organized for diverse users, supported by government subsidies, showcasing China's unique approach to AI integration and commercialization.

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China's "lobster farming" is so sensational that the whole world is astonished. Goldman Sachs sales are surprised: The speed and enthusiasm of the Chinese people!