China's OpenClaw Frenzy: MiniMax Shares Up 600% Since IPO

One month into the OpenClaw craze, China’s AI ecosystem is showing the financial effects. Nearly 1,000 people lined up outside Tencent’s Shenzhen headquarters in March for on-site OpenClaw installations, and the momentum hasn’t slowed.

Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, ByteDance’s Volcano Engine, JD.com, and Baidu have all released OpenClaw variants or integrations. Local governments are backing the ecosystem too — Shenzhen’s Longgang district offered grants up to 10 million yuan ($1.4M) for “one-person companies” building OpenClaw apps, while Wuxi dangled up to 5 million yuan for OpenClaw-powered breakthroughs in robotics and industrial applications.

The stock market is responding. MiniMax shares are up 27.4% over the past week and more than 600% from its IPO earlier this year — at one point briefly surpassing Baidu’s market cap despite Baidu generating 230x more revenue. Tencent is up 8.9% over the same period.

A cottage industry has also emerged around the platform: engineers charging 500 yuan (~$72) for on-site installation, and additional fees to uninstall for users who get cold feet about giving an AI agent full access to their digital lives.

Beijing has moved to warn government agencies and state-owned enterprises against installing OpenClaw on work devices, citing security risks — but that hasn’t stopped the private sector momentum.