On Entrepreneurial Street in Beijing’s Zhongguancun district, a bar called AGI is becoming a new gathering spot for artificial intelligence professionals. Owner Song De has infused the concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI) into a physical space: for 9.9 yuan (approximately $1.47), customers purchase a signature foamy drink and gain access to an AI agent via the bar’s WiFi, receiving free and unlimited DeepSeek coding tokens—compute power supplied by two Nvidia DGX Spark computers on display inside the venue.
Song De, an independent AI developer in his 30s, runs the bar in his spare time. He opened AGI Bar last year in Zhongguancun, Beijing’s Haidian District, naming it after the concept of artificial general intelligence. Zhongguancun is often called “China’s Silicon Valley,” and the area around Innovation Avenue is home to Tsinghua University and Peking University—institutions that cultivate top AI talent—as well as offices of Chinese and foreign tech companies including DeepSeek and Microsoft.
“You’ll see people from different labs, competing companies, and different universities sitting around the same table, talking freely about industry trends,” Song De said. The bar has hosted parties for Chinese AI labs including Z.ai, and regularly holds developer seminars, open-source AI panel discussions, and university research meetups.
Outside the entrance stands a massive bronze gong—the actual one struck when Z.ai listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January—now serving as a signature landmark at the door. Inside, the walls are covered with logos of major Chinese AI companies, colorful figurines, and merchandise, visually forming a miniature chronicle of China’s AI industry.
The bar’s registered Chinese name is itself a double entendre—”Knowledge Distillation”—playfully referencing both the craft of distilling spirits and the increasingly prominent concept of model distillation in AI. Song De explained: “First, it’s an AI technical term referring to transferring knowledge from a large model to a smaller one; but in a bar, the exchange between people is also a form of knowledge distillation.”
Song De believes AI and alcohol share three main commonalities: hallucinations, bubbles, and distillation. He elaborated on his philosophy: “We say AI is the public utility of the future, just like water, electricity, and the internet. AI should be as accessible as WiFi.” He added that the discovery of AI is more significant than the Industrial Revolution.
Operationally, Song De has automated most of the bar’s back-end processes. Inventory management, reservation systems, utility controls, and the membership system are all run by AI agents in the background, with human staff retained only where necessary. “We’ve connected all the lighting, software, and hardware in the bar to application programming interfaces (APIs) processed by AI. We strive to avoid wasting human labor on tedious, unnecessary operational tasks.”
The bar in some ways reflects China’s broader push to drive economic transformation through AI. Retirees are beginning to use AI agents, coding education has entered mainstream primary school curricula, and top universities are incorporating AI into their programs—while also bringing a degree of employment restructuring.
Given strong demand, Song De plans to expand the Beijing location this year and eventually introduce humanoid robots to serve drinks—humanoid robots being viewed as another hallmark of China’s innovation efforts. In June, he opened a branch in Shanghai, extending the concept beyond the capital.
However, much like many Chinese open-source models that offer services at costs far below US proprietary models, AGI Bar has yet to turn a profit. Song De admitted candidly: “This bar is completely losing money. The number of drinks given away is definitely ten times the number sold.”
The bar’s signature drink, named AGI like the establishment itself, is a foamy beverage priced at 9.9 yuan. But for many patrons, the real draw is the digital experience rather than the drink itself: connecting to the WiFi grants free DeepSeek coding credits, a model that concretizes the “buy a beer, get tokens” concept into daily practice within Zhongguancun’s tech community.