This summer, Lenovo AI shines on the World Cup’s green fields.

As an official technology partner of the FIFA World Cup, Lenovo ThinkSystem servers and AI infrastructure are operating at the Dallas International Broadcast Center and across various stadiums, supporting the event broadcast and video referee systems for billions of global viewers.

Recently, Gartner updated its Global Supply Chain Top 25 list, with Lenovo Group ranking fifth—its first appearance in the global top five, achieving its highest-ever ranking and maintaining its position as the top supply chain in Asia-Pacific. Lenovo officially released an article systematically discussing the strength of its supply chain.

These high-profile news stories outline a clear trajectory for Lenovo’s AI transformation. Whether through Ultimate polishing (extreme refinement) of its supply chain or stable delivery for major events, each achievement proves that Lenovo is vigorously transforming into an AI infrastructure provider, positioning itself upstream in the AI industry chain.

Servers, storage, data networks—everything operates orderly within Yang Yuanqing’s most familiar domain, stable and predictable.

This stability forms a stark contrast to Lenovo’s attitude toward AI transformation nine years ago.

In 2017, Yang Yuanqing stood on the Tech World stage, wearing a smart ECG shirt, and opened with a holographic projection avatar, declaring to the world that Lenovo would “bet its entire future on AI.”

That year, Lenovo’s financials were not impressive. Revenue from its Personal Computer and Smart Device business fell 2% year-over-year, while its Mobile business revenue dropped 10%. The smartphone business slumped, and the PC business was surpassed by HP. Yang Yuanqing needed to tell the market a new story.

All in AI was rolled out. To achieve this, Yang Yuanqing proposed a “Three-Wave” strategy: the first wave to maintain the global leadership and profitability of its core PC business; the second wave to expand into smartphones and data center businesses, hoping they would quickly become engines of growth and profit; the third wave to bet on natural language interaction and artificial intelligence, making Lenovo’s hardware devices smarter and keeping customers engaged with Lenovo after purchasing its devices.

In short, Lenovo did not want to rely solely on selling computers anymore.

To prove this was not just talk, Lenovo immediately released three AI products: a smart ECG shirt, a smart speaker+, and a mixed-reality headset device, Morning Star AR. Newly appointed CTO Rui Yong took the stage to introduce Lenovo’s AI Layout (strategic Layout ) across life, work, and society.

At that time, Yang Yuanqing’s attitude toward AI transformation left little room for compromise: “Transformation is never an easy journey for any enterprise. If it doesn’t involve shedding several layers of skin, it’s not transformation.”

Unfortunately, most of these products later faded into obscurity. Lenovo’s AI transformation continued, but today’s Lenovo AI bears little resemblance to Yang Yuanqing’s 2017 declaration. Over a decade, Yang Yuanqing has gradually scaled back Lenovo’s AI ambitions, embarking on a conventional yet subtly dynamic path.

I. Yang Yuanqing Retreats to the Safety Zone

Yang Yuanqing was not born conservative.

In 1989, Yang Yuanqing graduated with a master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China and became one of Lenovo’s first publicly recruited university graduates. He originally wanted to pursue R&D, but Lenovo needed salespeople most at the time, so he was assigned to sell Sun workstations. A master’s graduate in computer science began peddling products door-to-door on a bicycle.

In 1994, Liu Chuanzhi tasked the 29-year-old Yang Yuanqing with leading the Microcomputer Business Division. Liu later admitted that entrusting a young man with saving the market was a gamble. Yang Yuanqing did not disappoint—by 1997, Lenovo became China’s top PC brand.

An even bigger gamble came in 2004 when Lenovo acquired IBM’s PC business, then generating $17.5 billion in revenue. Despite significant internal controversy, Yang Yuanqing’s persuasive arguments led to the approval of what media called a “snake swallowing an elephant” merger.

A company with annual revenue of just a few hundred million RMB daring to acquire a multinational giant with $10 billion in revenue—this bold move laid the foundation for Lenovo’s globalization and defined Yang Yuanqing’s early career image: daring, aggressive, and willing to stand against consensus.

In the AI era, Yang Yuanqing seems to have adopted a different persona.

Looking back, the 2017 Three-Wave strategy may have included safety margins from the start. The first and second waves served as Lenovo’s fallback options—even if AI bets faltered, Lenovo could still rely on PCs and servers.

Indeed, Lenovo’s second-wave transformation did not go smoothly. After 2017, its smartphone business sustained losses. The smartphone and data center businesses failed to become new growth engines, instead dragging down financials year after year.

In FY 2017/18 (April 2017–March 2018), Lenovo’s Mobile business (smartphones) generated $7.241 billion in revenue, down 6% year-over-year, continuing to lose money after acquiring Motorola and falling short of expectations. Meanwhile, the Group’s Data Center business remained unprofitable, with an operating loss of $305 million.

By FY 2018/19, both Mobile and Data Center businesses grew but remained unprofitable.

At the time, Yang Yuanqing verbally gave the Three-Wave strategy a score of 80. However, subsequent actions suggested he was gradually reining in his ambitions.

Over the next few years, Lenovo’s AI narrative underwent two rebrandings.

In 2019, Lenovo established its 3S (Smart IoT, Smart Infrastructure, Smart Verticals) transformation strategy.

By 2023, Yang Yuanqing explicitly proposed Hybrid AI, advocating for the coexistence and complementary use of personal, enterprise, and public intelligence. By then, Lenovo was no longer attempting to compete head-on with internet giants in public cloud AI or consumer-end battles, instead retreating to its more familiar territory of edge devices and infrastructure.

To some extent, Yang Yuanqing’s sales background and past success stemmed from mastering predictable businesses—low inventory, fast turnover, and ultimate (extreme) supply chain efficiency. This held true in the PC era and the server era. AI’s uncertainty may inherently clash with his business DNA.

In April 2024, Yang Yuanqing set a goal at the new fiscal year kickoff to turn ISG (Infrastructure Solutions Group) profitable.

By 2026, ISG delivered impressive results. Lenovo’s FY 2025/26 data showed group revenue of $83.1 billion, surpassing $80 billion for the first time. AI-related revenue grew 105% year-over-year. In Q4, ISG revenue reached $5.6 billion, with an operating profit of $202 million—both record highs since the business’s inception. Full-year ISG revenue hit $19.2 billion, turning from a $68.5 million loss the previous year to a $73 million profit. AI server revenue achieved strong double-digit growth, with an end-of-year project backlog of $21 billion.

At the earnings call, Yang Yuanqing said, “We’ve closed the best year in Lenovo’s history.”

Yang Yuanqing is steering Lenovo back to its most familiar territory—becoming a hardware supplier enhanced with AI capabilities.

At the FY 2025/26 Q2 earnings call, he emphasized that AI computing’s center of gravity is shifting from model training on public clouds to inference deployment in local data centers and edge devices. This positioning places Lenovo in a similar ecological niche as NVIDIA—as a “shovel seller” in the AI gold rush.

In summer 2026, Lenovo became an official technology partner of the FIFA World Cup. From ThinkSystem servers at the Dallas International Broadcast Center to data processing nodes at stadiums, Lenovo’s AI infrastructure supported event broadcasts and video referee systems. This was a large-scale demonstration of Lenovo’s computing capabilities, packaging servers, storage, and liquid cooling solutions into an event-ready solution.

Meanwhile, on June 24, MWC 26 Shanghai opened with signals of a backlog in AI server orders. Reports indicated Lenovo had approximately $150 billion in server orders to fulfill, with products in short supply. AI server demand was expected to remain high for some time.

However, as Lenovo showcased its computing prowess, ambiguous signals emerged in the industry.

In July 2026, Meta announced plans to sell AI computing power and model access to external clients. As one of the world’s largest GPU purchasers, Meta had previously planned a 1.3 million-GPU computing cluster. The news triggered a pullback in AI hardware-related stocks.

Discussions about computing overcapacity directly pressured Lenovo’s ongoing AI infrastructure business.

Ablikim Ablimit, Lenovo Group’s Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer for China, responded: “Long-term AI computing demand in both Chinese and overseas markets remains substantial; no overcapacity has emerged.”

This timely response signaled Lenovo’s sensitivity to market perceptions of its infrastructure business. Over the past decade, Yang Yuanqing has steadily narrowed Lenovo’s AI strategy into a safety zone—servers, storage, computing power, infrastructure—all familiar territory for Lenovo.

Within this safety zone, Lenovo’s business logic is self-consistent and smooth. Demand is predictable, business models are established, and Lenovo’s decades of accumulated expertise can be maximally leveraged. The trade-off is that the safety zone is walled off.

Inside Lenovo, someone is attempting to broaden these walls.

II. Liu Jun Refuses to Settle

On June 1, 2015, evening.

Liu Jun joked on Weibo about celebrating Children’s Day. A few hours later, Yang Yuanqing sent a personnel adjustment email, relieving Liu Jun of his role as President of the Mobile Business Group. Liu Jun was unprepared.

Forty-eight days after his departure, Liu Jun posted his first WeChat Moments update: “Refreshing!” The accompanying image showed nine empty wine bottles of different styles, all uncorked. This was Liu Jun’s initial state after leaving—drowning his sorrows in wine. He spent a long time in the U.S., initially sleeping excessively for months.

However, Liu Jun’s departure was not solely due to performance. The deeper reason was a significant strategic divergence between his vision for the mobile business and Yang Yuanqing’s established goals.

The seeds of this divergence were sown earlier.

Liu Jun had once led Lenovo Mobile to its peak. In 2013, Lenovo surpassed Samsung to become China’s top smartphone brand. When a quarterly forecast suggested they might overtake Samsung, Liu Jun worried and discussed with his team whether to “hide their edge” to avoid becoming a target by reaching No. 1 too soon.

After acquiring Motorola Mobility, however, Liu Jun and Yang Yuanqing increasingly diverged on strategic positioning—whether Motorola should re-enter the Chinese market and how to synergize with Lenovo’s proprietary brand. These disagreements became irreconcilable, leading to Liu Jun’s sudden exit.

Just two years later, the story took a turn.

On May 16, 2017, before Yang Yuanqing declared Lenovo’s all-in bet on AI, he personally persuaded Liu Jun to return. In an internal letter, Yang Yuanqing called Liu Jun a legendary Lenovo veteran who joined in 1993 and achieved outstanding results in product development, sales, planning, and other roles.

However, upon returning, Liu Jun only oversaw Lenovo’s China PC business.

He told the media he had two missions: to elevate Lenovo’s China PC business to new heights and to rapidly bring Lenovo’s strong technologies to market, helping grow new non-PC businesses.

Two months later, at Tech World, he stood on stage introducing Morning Star AR and proposed renovating Lenovo’s tens of thousands of stores.

Afterward, on the AI path, Liu Jun and Yang Yuanqing diverged.

In August 2017, Liu Jun led the China management team to a strategy meeting at the Sunrise Kempinski Hotel by Yanqi Lake in Huairou, Beijing. After over 100 days of research and visits, the discussed direction was named the “Sunrise Eastern” strategy.

Liu Jun consistently emphasized to his team, “Merely selling PCs is a dead end.” He proposed two transformations for Lenovo China: a customer-centric transformation and a smart products and services transformation. The core was to break free from Lenovo’s inherent (entrenched) PC-only mindset.

Nine years on, the “Sunrise Eastern” strategy still operates within Yang Yuanqing’s overall “Hybrid AI” framework.

In March 2025, at Lenovo’s new fiscal year kickoff, Liu Jun announced an upgraded “Sunrise Eastern” strategy, defining a new mission: “Hybrid AI accelerates China’s intelligent transformation.”

He introduced the concept of an “Intelligent Agent Legion,” with Lenovo’s enterprise super-intelligent agent “LeXiang” serving as a unified gateway, and marketing, sales, and service agents forming a “silicon-based team.” In personal AI, the Tianxi personal super-intelligent agent evolved from an “assistant” to a “teammate.”

These moves structurally differ from Yang Yuanqing’s ISG route—while Yang Yuanqing delivers servers and computing power to clients, Liu Jun attempts to integrate intelligent agents and solutions into clients’ actual business processes.

However, within Lenovo’s organizational structure, China is just one business unit. Liu Jun can advance the “Sunrise Eastern” strategy within China, but resource allocation and strategic direction at the group level remain under Yang Yuanqing’s control.

Yang Yuanqing defined 2024 as the “beginning of the AI transformation era,” but the actual execution main storyline (main thread) resembles ISG—selling servers, computing power, and storage.

Even though Liu Jun emphasized on multiple occasions that AI cannot merely involve selling hardware but must penetrate industries, scenarios, and applications, given Lenovo’s scale and Yang Yuanqing’s management style, innovation may exist locally but is unlikely to dominate the overall logic.

This echoes a similar moment in Lenovo’s history.

Around 2000, internal friction arose between Yang Yuanqing and Guo Wei over PC market share. Liu Chuanzhi ultimately chose to split the company—Yang Yuanqing led Lenovo PC, while Guo Wei departed with Digital China. Liu had hoped for “Yang Yuanqing as primary, Guo Wei as supportive,” but the split became inevitable.

Today, the dynamic between Yang Yuanqing and Liu Jun may not reach a split, but the tension—one operating within a safety zone of predictable businesses, the other attempting to forge new paths outside it—mirrors the past.

ISG’s demand is predictable, and its business model is established. Lenovo need only leverage its PC-era supply chain advantages to achieve foreseeable results. Liu Jun’s intelligent agent business resembles guerrilla warfare outside the safety zone.

As of June 30, 2026, Lenovo LeXiang’s cumulative sales exceeded 5 billion RMB, with 7 million monthly active users. However, this accounted for less than 1% of Lenovo Group’s FY 2025/26 revenue of approximately 580 billion RMB. For now, Liu Jun’s guerrilla efforts have yielded results but are unlikely to alter Lenovo’s overall AI transformation trajectory.

III. Subtle Currents Flow Outside the Safety Zone

Yang Yuanqing’s choice is understandable from a business perspective.

The global AI industry has shifted from training to inference. Yang Yuanqing positioned Lenovo at this inflection point. FY 2025/26 financial data showed a 50% growth in Lenovo’s AI server revenue, with over 140 billion RMB in order backlog providing high growth certainty.

In this track ( track ), Lenovo need not compete with OpenAI on models or NVIDIA on chips. It needs only to transfer its PC-era supply chain, channels, and customer relationships to AI infrastructure. After ISG turned profitable, its stock price rose, and analysts increased target prices. Financially, this logic is proving effective.

In the long run, Lenovo's moat needs careful examination.

Lenovo does not have its own self-developed chips and relies heavily on leading manufacturers such as NVIDIA and AMD for the cores of its AI servers. Lenovo also lacks self-developed large models; the core of its 'Tianxi Personal Super Intelligent Agent' relies on open-source large models and third-party technologies. Additionally, Lenovo does not possess a cloud platform like AWS or Azure, and the essence of its ISG business remains the logic of assembling and selling hardware.

On the AI infrastructure industrial chain, Lenovo currently functions more like a traditional IT integrator. It leverages its supply chain and channel advantages to integrate externally procured chips, models, and software components into server chassis, delivering them as a whole to customers.

If this positioning solidifies, Lenovo will face dual uncertainties. It may lose the brand recognition it accumulated in the consumer market during the PC era, as enterprise customers are more concerned with cost-effectiveness and stability, with limited brand loyalty. At the same time, it will fail to establish new technological barriers in the AI era.

Today, the global AI trend is rapidly evolving. Recent discussions sparked by Meta's sale of computing power reaffirm a definitive trend: the market's approach to evaluating computing power is shifting from scale to efficiency. If the industry transitions from a Token maxing phase to a Token minimizing phase, the business model of simply providing computing power hardware may undergo revaluation.

Ablikim said that there is no overcapacity in computing power. From a long-term demand perspective, this judgment does have merit. However, short-term market sentiment and industry structural adjustments will not cease due to one or two statements.

Meanwhile, Liu Jun's exploration at the application layer faces a completely different competitive landscape. There are numerous startups in the intelligent agent sector, and the AI PC market includes competitors like Apple, Microsoft, and HP. Lenovo's investment scale in this direction, compared to its competitors, resembles a limited sound out (tentative exploration).

Therefore, Yang Yuanqing's strategic choice is nearly flawless in terms of business logic: safeguard advantages, consolidate positions, and earn the most certain profits amidst turbulent new waves. However, a company's perfect business choice sometimes means it forgoes the potentially greater growth opportunities hidden in uncertainties.

Does the 62-year-old Yang Yuanqing still have the courage to bet his entire fortune on AI?

In 2017, Yang Yuanqing said, 'I'm betting my life on it.' Back then, Lenovo at least acknowledged that the AI path was fraught with uncertainties and required some risky attempts to seek breakthroughs. By 2026, Lenovo has eliminated uncertainties from its strategy. All AI narratives revolve around certainty: certain sectors, certain customers, and certain business models.

Liu Jun is still outside the safe house, attempting to prove the existence of another path. However, the question of how long guerrilla warfare can last remains unanswered.

The name 'Lenovo' originates from the 'Lenovo Chinese Character Card' invented by Ni Guangnan, which suggests a series of phrases after typing the first character. Today's Lenovo AI strategy follows a certain commercial correctness, but looking back at the company's history, the name 'Lenovo' represents the ability to connect and create.