China's OpenClaw Boom Is a Gold Rush for AI Companies
China has quietly become the world’s largest OpenClaw market — surpassing US usage figures — and the economic ripple effects are transforming the country’s AI industry into something resembling a gold rush. A new WIRED investigation documents what’s happening on the ground: ordinary people renting cloud servers to run OpenClaw agents, buying AI subscriptions in bulk, and driving demand for the lower-cost Chinese AI models that make the economics of running agents feasible at scale. The primary beneficiaries aren’t the users themselves — it’s the cloud providers, AI subscription platforms, and model vendors cashing in on the frenzy. ...