Wedonay.com Report on Mar 7th, A long queue of nearly a thousand people formed at the entrance of Tencent's Shenzhen headquarters, with developers and AI enthusiasts waiting to complete the cloud installation of OpenClaw with the assistance of Tencent Cloud engineers. According to on-site staff, this event utilized Tencent Cloud's Lighthouse service for deployment, enabling free installation in just 5 minutes. At 10 AM, the first wave of over eighty enthusiasts began entering the venue; by around 11 AM, all several hundred appointment slots allocated for the day had been distributed.
This offline queuing spectacle originated from the rapid rise in popularity of an open-source AI agent framework called OpenClaw. Developed by programmer Peter Steinberger, OpenClaw (formerly known as Clawdbot, Moltbot) uses TypeScript as its core language and features a distinctive "blue lobster" icon design. Its slogan, "The AI that actually does things," accurately summarizes its technical positioning.
Unlike traditional conversational AI, OpenClaw is not merely a chatbot that can only "answer questions"; it is a digital employee capable of "executing tasks." Driven by natural language instructions, it can perform practical operations such as file manipulation, browser automation, API calls, and multi-step task chain orchestration in local or private cloud environments, achieving a capability leap from "advising" to "executing." It is precisely this "hands-on ability" that has allowed it to rapidly accumulate immense popularity within the developer community.
Recently, OpenClaw achieved a milestone in GitHub history: in just 100 days, its star count surpassed that of Linux, which had long dominated the rankings, making it the all-time number one on GitHub. This has sparked a nationwide "lobster-raising" craze—OpenClaw's developer community calls themselves "lobster farmers." Data from Tencent Cloud shows that the number of "lobster farmers" on the OpenClaw cloud has now exceeded 100,000. Consequently, the number of developers using Tencent Cloud Lighthouse and its server core usage have repeatedly hit new historical peaks.
Faced with this phenomenal open-source AI project, domestic cloud service providers have quickly responded, collectively following up with strategic deployments. Tencent Cloud took the lead by launching the first OpenClaw application template in China, offering one-click deployment and a visual configuration panel, significantly lowering the barrier to entry. Following closely, major cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud, JD Cloud, Volcano Engine, and Baidu AI Cloud have also successively launched cloud deployment services for OpenClaw. These cloud vendors are competing to optimize the deployment experience, aiming to seize the entry advantage in this emerging field of AI Agents.
