George Zhang thought OpenClaw could make him rich, even though he didn’t really understand how the viral AI agent software worked. But he saw a video of a Chinese social media influencer demonstrating how it could be deployed to manage stock portfolios and make investment decisions autonomously. Zhang, who works in cross-border ecommerce in the Chinese city of Xiamen, was intrigued enough that he decided to try installing OpenClaw in late February.

Zhang is one of the many people in China who got swept up in the craze over OpenClaw recently. Workshops teaching people how to use the AI agent have popped up in cities across the country, drawing crowds of hundreds. Tech companies are racing to integrate OpenClaw into their platforms, while local governments have announced subsidies for entrepreneurs building products with it. Late last week, images of grandpas and grandmas lining up to install the software went viral across the internet.

After renting a cloud server from Tencent and buying a subscription to the Chinese large language model Kimi, Zhang could start chatting with his OpenClaw agent, or his “lobster,” as many Chinese people call theirs. At first, Zhang tells me, he was impressed by the AI agent as he watched it quickly generate a long market analysis based on the latest breaking news. But a few days in, his lobster started slacking off, and it would generate only a basic outline of market trends instead of a detailed report. He asked OpenClaw to generate something like what it had done on the first day, to which the agent perpetually responded that it was “working on it” before never returning any results.

Zhang’s conclusion was that OpenClaw is not designed for people like him who don’t have any coding skills. “It would tell me I needed to configure the API port. But that’s a technical task, not something I can do unless I had a tutorial walking me through it step-by-step,“ he says. In the end, he gave up on letting his lobster trade stocks, settling instead on asking it to aggregate AI industry news, which he used to build a social media content farm on WeChat.

This week, I checked in with half a dozen users of OpenClaw in China about their experiences with the agent, and a clear picture of division emerged between the adopters who are technologically savvy and those who are not. People who are proficient in AI see OpenClaw as a game changer in productivity, but those with no technical background feel they were promised a miraculously powerful AI product that ultimately didn’t deliver. But by the time the bubble burst, they had already started paying for cloud servers and LLM tokens.

The real driver of the OpenClaw mania in China isn’t everyday users, but rather the Chinese companies that stand to benefit financially from its widespread adoption. Major tech firms like Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Minimax, Moonshot, and Z.ai all saw the AI productivity FOMO as a rare chance to get normal people to start paying for AI services, and they are reaping the biggest rewards from it.

“A chatbot uses only a few hundred tokens per conversation; a single active OpenClaw instance can consume tens or even hundreds of times more tokens per day,” says Poe Zhao, a tech analyst and founder of the newsletter Hello China Tech. Every new user of OpenClaw is someone who’s paying 24/7 for LLM API calls. “That’s why Tencent engineers were setting up tables outside headquarters to help people install the software for free,” he says.

“I Couldn’t Understand Any of It”

Song Zhuoqun, a college student in China, says she started running into problems with OpenClaw as soon as she tried installing it. Song is a social media intern at an AI startup but has no programming experience, so figuring out how to get OpenClaw running turned out to be difficult. She asked Doubao, ByteDance’s popular AI chatbot, to generate a step-by-step tutorial for her, but it wasn’t much help.

“There were pages full of code, and I couldn’t understand any of it. I just kept asking the AI to generate a response for me, then I’d paste it over, run it, and it would run into an error, so I’d try a new response,” she says. The installation ended up being the most frustrating part of trying out OpenClaw for Song, and she didn’t feel like she learned anything from it.

The gaming community freaked out last week when Seamus Blackley, the original creator of Xbox, claimed the console was sunsetting in an interview with Gamesbeat.

However, if you read the interview or his comments on Bluesky, you’ll realize he meant that something at the core of Xbox feels off: The console he built is in “distress.” Blackley speculated that the February shuffle of Asha Sharma from AI executive to executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft Gaming means the product is in “palliative care.”

Xbox is not shutting down, but many were quick to believe the headlines, as there’s a dark cloud over the industry right now. What happened?

While gaming experienced an unprecedented high during the pandemic, artificial intelligence crept up behind it. AI’s proliferation in the gaming industry is already accelerating job loss and cheapening the work of developers at studios now scrutinized by anti-AI gamers. Data centers have siphoned RAM from the industry, resulting in a global memory shortage. This has driven up the costs of hardware required for consoles, stalling releases and rendering at-home PC building—one a rite of passage for entry-level gamers—a luxury.

In December, Valve announced it was discontinuing its Steam Deck LCD 256GB model, released in 2022, and the 2023 upgrade has all but disappeared. This is the first discontinuation of a major console before the launch of a worthy upgrade; Valve’s Steam Machine, a box six times more powerful than the Steam Deck, is meant to be released this year, but its exact timing and cost remain unknown. Meanwhile, prices have gone up on Xbox and PS5. Per Bloomberg, Sony has yet to confirm or deny that the successor to the PS5, originally slated for release in late 2027, is delayed another year. And Nintendo, having narrowly avoided new tariffs to the Switch 2 launch in 2025, which they are now suing the US government over, is not considering price hikes.

Six years ago, while the world was in lockdown, the gaming industry was thriving.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold 13.4 million units within just six weeks of its launch date in March 2020, the most digital units of a console game ever sold in a single month. That same year, global gaming revenue increased by 23 percent, and millions who would not have previously labeled themselves gamers picked up controllers and booted up PCs.

When the Playstation 5 launched in November 2020, seven years after its predecessor, it felt like a promise that the gaming industry would be fine, even while other industries struggled to adjust to the pandemic. In July of 2021, Valve revealed the Steam Deck, a handheld console that would make it possible to play Steam games anywhere. Preorders sold out within hours.

Meanwhile, YouTubers and Twitch streamers rose in popularity with millions at home watching gamers stream in place of other on-screen entertainment. The power centers of the game industry began to bulge. Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax Media. Sony responded by acquiring Bungie in 2022 while making a $1.45 billion investment in Epic Games. Job postings in the gaming space rose by 40 percent during the pandemic.

But the rise of AI has prompted a random-access memory shortage now being referred to as RAMaggedon—and it’s bringing all of this progress to a grinding halt.

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence has upended every corner of the tech industry. Nearly a third of adults and most teens in the US use AI on a daily basis, according to Pew Research. Data centers have doubled in the US since 2022, raising electricity costs up to 267 percent more than they were five years ago for households near those warehouses, according to Bloomberg. Reports show the US accounts for more than half of “hyperscale facilities,” centers built specifically for AI, many of which are multibillion-dollar investments.

MTN has launched a click-to-deploy satellite service on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace.

The service is described as being ideal for enterprises requiring last-mile connectivity and secure cloud backhauling to any remote site in the world. It is built to allow enterprises to deploy private low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite connectivity to any remote site in as little as 24 hours.

The partnership means that enterprises can obtain private connectivity services over LEO satellite constellations via their AWS account, securely routing remote site traffic directly to their AWS Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), using simplified procurement and consolidated billing through their existing AWS accounts. This, says MTN, eliminates the need for standard virtual private networks (VPNs) and tunnelling that can introduce extra latency.

StarEdge Horizon is a Layer 2 network architecture that operates over LEO satellite constellations. By routing long-haul traffic on a private path off the public internet, MTN claims its service significantly improves security, predictability and performance for global remote operations.

The move brings StarEdge Horizon’s full satellite communications capabilities a few clicks away for AWS Marketplace customers, allowing enterprises across all sectors to rapidly acquire and integrate the private LEO satellite service directly into their cloud strategy.

StarEdge Horizon’s availability on AWS Marketplace is designed to streamline IT and network operations for cloud-centric enterprises with a number of key features such as direct-to-cloud peering and simplified enterprise procurement. The service provides private connectivity options to major hyperscalers, serving as the critical last-mile link and backhaul path for accessing cloud services. This allows customers to extend their corporate network and securely route remote sites directly.

Users can find, subscribe to and deploy StarEdge Horizon through the AWS Marketplace catalogue, a facet attributed with streamlining the purchase process and accelerating deployment, allowing organisations to consolidate billing.

Through its true Layer 2 private network architecture, the service is said to offer unified Security and Simplified WAN, allowing remote sites to connect into the corporate WAN via MTN’s points of presence. This subsequently enables centralised internet access and security policy enforcement under one policy at the customer’s cloud or datacentre.

Static IP and centralised management capabilities offer true static IP addressing and subnet allocation. This is crucial for centralised monitoring, policy enforcement and application allow-listing – capabilities essential for enterprise security and remote management.

Enterprises can establish connectivity to StarEdge Horizon via a shared transit gateway attachment, enabling integration with the suite of AWS services, including Cloud WAN and Site Link. Such a streamlined architecture is said to allow organisations to be able to deploy this service globally in as little as 24 hours.

StarEdge Horizon is being rolled out with enterprise customers across land-based sectors including energy, construction and logistics. “StarEdge Horizon’s availability on AWS Marketplace is a crucial step in transforming LEO connectivity into an easily procurable, enterprise-grade networking solution in just a few clicks,” said Brian Govanlu, director of engineering at MTN.

“Our Layer 2 architecture, combined with the streamlined purchasing and cloud integration of AWS Marketplace, gives customers the fastest, most secure and most cost-effective way to extend their cloud environment to any remote site in the world. It is the ideal solution for enterprises requiring reliable last-mile connectivity and secure cloud backhauling to any remote site in the world.”