Not a token effort: beer meets AI at bar in China’s capital

Not a token effort: beer meets artificial intelligence at bar in China’s capital

The AGI Bar in Beijing’s Zhongguancun tech hub offers free tokens to customers who order a drink

Drinks, music, vibes … what else can a bar offer to attract customers? One in China’s capital, Beijing, is betting on unlimited access to artificial intelligence models.

The AGI Bar in the Zhongguancun tech hub, known as China’s Silicon Valley, was packed with laptop-using customers on a recent night. One of the first things many did after ordering a drink was to connect to the in-house Wi-fi and configure an AI agent to access the free tokens the bar provides.

Manager Yang Yuan said the bar, which opened in June last year, offered customers free tokens for any AI model as long as they ordered a drink and installed a plug-in on their laptop to access the bar’s AI agent. It offers more than a dozen drinks, with a glass of its bestselling AGI beer priced at just 9.9 yuan (US$1.47).

The bar also runs DeepSeek-V4-Flash locally on two Nvidia DGX Spark computers, allowing customers to access the model without charge.

When asked how many tokens the bar consumed each month, Yang declined to provide an exact figure, saying the costs were covered by the bar’s owner.

Named after artificial general intelligence, a theoretical development that would see AI match or surpass human capabilities, the bar’s walls are covered with logos and merchandise from major Chinese AI companies, including Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.