There is a bar on Inno Way in Zhongguancun, Haidian District, Beijing. Opening the door and stepping inside, one finds two computers sitting behind the counter instead of liquor bottles. They are NVIDIA DGX Sparks. In front of them, customers order a cocktail priced at 9.9 yuan. That is under 2,000 Korean won, roughly 1.4 US dollars. Its name is AGI. What comes served in the glass is almost entirely foam.

This place does not share a Wi-Fi password. Instead, it hands out tokens. Once you connect to the shop network, an AI agent attaches itself, and DeepSeek tokens for coding flow without limits. They are not borrowed from some distant data center. Those two machines on the display shelf run DeepSeek V4 Flash directly. For the price of a single beer, a whole AI model comes along with it.

The owner is Song De, an independent developer in his thirties. The registered trade name of the shop is Knowledge Distillation. It layers the distillation of liquor and the distillation of AI models onto a single word. Inventory, reservations, and membership management are all handled by agents. All that remains for a human to do is wipe the glasses.

It does not make money. The owner said so himself. He mentioned that this bar runs at a complete loss, and that the drinks given away for free outnumber those sold by tenfold. Yet this year he expanded the Beijing shop. In June, he opened a branch in Shanghai. Next, he says he will have humanoid robots carry the drinks.

At this point, I laughed, and then felt a chill down my spine.

I publish briefings and newsletters every day. I run several models. Looking at the monthly bills that arrive, I calculate how much each sentence costs. To me, tokens are an expense. They are something to be used sparingly. But in that bar in Zhongguancun, tokens are peanuts served with beer. You eat them without counting.

One side sells tokens. The other scatters them. The side scattering tokens seems to be running a losing business, but in truth, they are buying habits. When a twenty-year-old student writes their first code using a model that came with a glass of beer, that model's grammar stays in their hands. A tool learned by paying money can be swapped out someday. A tool absorbed into one's bones for free is hard to let go.

Electricity was like that. In the beginning, a few factories paid to pull it in. As the price fell and lines ran through every alley, no one talked about using electricity anymore. People simply flipped the switch. Song De wagered a bar on the belief that artificial intelligence will follow the same path.

Korea's laws and policies stand on the days when tokens were expensive. When the price is high, few people use them, and when few people use them, one can count who did what. Regulations were built on the premise of that tally. When the price nears zero, that very premise collapses. There is no clear place to ask who bears responsibility for code that flowed out of a bar.

Seoul also has startup streets. A cup of coffee costs about three times as much as that Beijing cocktail. Power outlets and Wi-Fi are provided generously. I have yet to see a place that hands out tokens. I do not think that difference is merely a difference between bars.

The Star, At Beijing AI-themed bar, DeepSeek tokens come with the pints, 2026-08-17

The Next Web, A Beijing bar swapped free Wi-Fi for free DeepSeek tokens, 2026-08-17

The shop is located in Building No. 2 on Zhongguancun Inno Way, Haidian District, Beijing. It is about halfway down the street and within a hundred meters of Che Ku Cafe. Tsinghua and Peking University are nearby, and the offices of DeepSeek and Microsoft are within walking distance. This is as far as the public address goes. The floor and room number appear nowhere.

The area is about fifty square meters. When thirty people enter, it is packed. On the ceiling, alongside data wiring, sensors measuring oxygen and carbon dioxide levels have been installed. There are studio lights, soundproof panels, and several vertical screens. The doors open at 3:00 PM and close at 11:00 PM. If the atmosphere runs hot, it stays open longer.

The opening date was June 1, 2025, Children's Day. That day, the model company Zhipu AI paid for all the drinks. The only drink customers paid for out of pocket was a single glass of AGI.

The prices are as follows. A regular glass of AGI Foam is 9.9 yuan, while a large glass is 9.11 yuan. The large glass is cheaper. It is a joke poking fun at the days when models used to answer that 9.11 was greater than 9.9. The extra-large is 19,999 yuan, and each time someone orders it, another 9 is appended to the end. Starting at 199, it has climbed this high. The remaining cocktails and beers are 39 yuan per glass.

This is how tokens are used. When you order a drink and connect to the store Wi-Fi, you receive an address and a key. You simply enter them directly into tools that support the OpenAI format. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Cherry Studio, and Chatbox are mentioned. The reported values are address token.agi.bar, key agi_bar, and model deepseek-v4-flash. Because only one outlet carried these values, I cannot confirm them with certainty. However, looking up that address yields 172.18.7.11. It is a private address unreachable from the outside. This aligns with the explanation that it is used only inside the store.

The service was announced on August 2, 2026. Once you leave the shop, the connection drops. Although it is said to be unlimited, a single set of hardware has limits on how many requests it can receive, so when crowds gather, delays occur. The only model currently running is DeepSeek V4 Flash. It is not yet available at the second branch in Shanghai.

Sources diverge on the number of machines. Outlets picking up Reuters wrote that there were two, while one outlet wrote one. Chinese media outlets did not specify the count. The side with photographs shows two. I have included the two-unit account in the text.

There is also a warning. All code, prompts, and conversations entered by customers pass through the shop's computers. Local media advised against connecting it to work-related projects.

The owner, Song De, is from Xuzhou in Jiangsu. His nickname is Da Congming. He runs the self-media Cyber Zen Mind, was a first-generation OpenAI plugin developer, and built WebPilot. The registered trade name of the shop is Knowledge Distillation.

A robot dog carries drinks, though it is still clumsy. They are preparing an AI cocktail machine and humanoid serving staff. Stickers on cups indicate that one is open to conversation. At an event held on the theme of debate, over three hundred people attended, spilling into the street. The second location opened in Shanghai in June 2026.

I also note the things I could not find in the end. The address of the Shanghai branch, the price of membership cards, phone numbers and reservation methods, and the exact count of DGX Sparks.

Additional references

AGI Bar official website agi.bar

Baidu Baike AGI Bar

TouZhong 一杯AI泡沫，定价9.9元

Huxiu 北京AGI酒吧成AI从业者新聚集地

NetEase AGI Bar 泡沫最大的酒吧

IT Home 北京一酒吧上线不限量免费 Token 服务

BlockTempo 來這家酒吧連上 Wi-Fi 就能免費暢用 DeepSeek V4 Flash, 2026-08-02

e-Digest 北京酒吧首創買酒送算力