Huawei's massive AI model for cultural tourism is live — it's already served 4 million visitors
When you walk through Xi’an’s Datang Never Night City during a peak holiday, as many as 23,000 people might be sharing the same street, phones out, streaming, navigating. Beneath the crowds, two infrastructure projects are working in tandem: a 1.2-petabyte AI model trained on 31 million images of Chinese cultural artifacts, and a 5G-A network pushing data at ten times the speed of standard 5G.
On June 29, Huawei and Shaanxi Cultural Investment Group scaled Boguan — the world’s first commercial multimodal large language model built specifically for cultural tourism — to production across Xi’an. Boguan was first announced in September 2025, when the two partners described it as a model purpose-built for cultural preservation rather than general-purpose chatting.
The numbers behind it are unusual even by big-model standards. Boguan’s training dataset totals 1.2 petabytes: 31 million tourism and museum images, 4.4 million minutes of cultural video footage, 2.18 million minutes of audio recordings, 510 three-dimensional artifact scans, and 960 million structured text entries. The model is designed to generate museum-grade reproductions of cultural objects, digitize traditional craft processes, and create digital IP from intangible cultural heritage — work that ordinarily requires teams of historians and conservators.
By March 2026, that work was already reaching real users. AI travel companion agents built on Boguan had been adopted by more than 4 million people. Its intangible-heritage digital IP had generated over 2 million yuan (roughly $275,000) in derivative product sales.
At the Datang Never Night City — one of Xi’an’s busiest tourist districts — China Telecom and Huawei deployed a 5G-A network using three-carrier aggregation. During the May Day holiday this year, that network supported roughly 23,000 simultaneous users in the district. Peak download speeds reached 3.5 Gbps, with uploads hitting 600 Mbps — roughly ten times what standard 5G delivers.
