# nickel supply

China’s ¥100bn Lunar New Year ‘Red‑Packet’ War Exposes an Emerging AI Compute Crunch

China’s Spring Festival promotional campaigns—collectively worth nearly ¥100 billion—have driven extreme traffic spikes that briefly knocked services offline and highlighted a growing mismatch between consumer‑facing AI adoption and available compute capacity. Firms are ramping cloud and data‑centre investments even as advances in models and token windows multiply inference demand, creating cross‑cutting pressures on energy systems and commodity supply chains.