China's 'Lipstick King' sells 100,000 AI memberships in 30 minutes

Chinese livestreamer Li Jiaqi, known as the "Lipstick King", sold 100,000 monthly memberships of Alibaba's QwenWork AI service within half an hour on Monday. Reuters reported the figure on Tuesday, attributing it to Alibaba, and called it the first time AI token packages have been a significant consumer category at Singles' Day.

It matters because Singles' Day is China's biggest shopping festival. Last year it brought in 1.70 trillion yuan ($255 billion) across platforms, according to data provider Syntun cited by Reuters. Putting AI credits next to cosmetics and appliances is a deliberate attempt to treat AI as an everyday purchase.

What was sold on the stream

The broadcast ran on Taobao Live. Alibaba said the memberships equal about 2 trillion AI tokens, the units of text that models process.

Li, who built his name selling lipstick on Taobao, appeared with Chen Yusen, an Alibaba vice president and CEO of QwenWork. According to the South China Morning Post, Chen told viewers that "tokens are the fuel that powers AI".

The SCMP says the stream drew "nearly 100,000" packages, while Reuters says 100,000. The gap is small, and both trace back to Alibaba. The state-owned Global Times calls the product Qwen Office and describes the cards as personal memberships.

Reuters says it was Li's first sale of AI products. The stream also showed AI-enabled laptops and workplace devices.

Tmall and JD.com both opened token shops

Alibaba's Tmall launched an AI Token Center for the festival. Reuters lists packages from Alibaba Cloud, MiniMax, Moonshot AI and Z.AI. The SCMP says at least six Chinese AI developers have joined, including DeepSeek, and describes the idea as topping up computing credits like mobile data.

Rival JD.com has its own token section, per Reuters, with services from DeepSeek, Z.AI and ByteDance's Volcano Engine.

Alibaba also pointed to demand before the stream. Finimize, summarising the Reuters report, says token plan sales from October 1 to October 20 rose 450% on the previous month. The Global Times reports that brand searches for Zhipu rose 50 times within 48 hours of its Tmall flagship store opening.

Tmall president Liu Bo had flagged the plan earlier. In an SCMP report on Alibaba's Singles' Day briefing, he said tokens would come in bundles for groups such as students, researchers and small teams.

What's still unclear

Reuters says it's unclear how much the token plans were discounted from normal prices. That's a big gap, since price cuts are the usual reason people buy during Singles' Day.

Details on the product itself are also thin. The Asia Business Daily, citing Chinese outlet Qilu Yidian, reports that the usable functions, the credit deduction method and the validity period had yet to be clearly established. Reuters quotes Omdia analyst Lian Jye Su as saying the tokens' relatively long expiry periods could encourage stockpiling. The two accounts don't line up, and I couldn't find an official Alibaba terms page to settle it.

Su also warned that fast-changing AI products may make shoppers wary of prepaying for services that could be replaced or retired. He said frequent users can run short of credits, which makes bulk buying in a sale "a very reasonable action".

One disclosure: the SCMP's own report notes that Alibaba owns the paper. The sales figure comes from Alibaba, and I haven't seen it independently verified.

The stakes for shoppers and AI firms

For model developers, a Tmall or JD.com storefront is a new sales channel that doesn't need a developer account or a credit card form. For shoppers, it turns a usage meter into something you buy like a phone top-up.

I think the headline number says as much about Li's reach as about demand for AI. A livestream with one of China's best-known sellers will probably move product whatever it is. Honestly, I'd wait for the discount details and the November 11 results before reading this as a lasting shift.

What happens next

Singles' Day is a multi-week event that culminates on November 11. Alibaba and JD.com will likely report on token sales after that date, though neither has said what it will disclose. Whether buyers actually use the credits they've prepaid for will take longer to show.