To the sorrow of millions of Chinese football fans, their national team will once again not be among the 48 sides taking the field when the World Cup kicks off next week in the US, Mexico, and Canada. But for one leading Chinese technology company, the tournament will still be a make-or-break chance to show whether it has the skills to play for the highest stakes.

Despite its status as the world’s largest PC maker, Lenovo Group has been left largely on the sidelines until now as rival information technology companies like Microsoft have ridden the global fever for artificial intelligence to gargantuan market valuations.

To get back in the game, Lenovo aims to leverage its role as the first “official global technology partner” of FIFA, the World Cup’s organizer, to showcase its AI systems to the planetwide audience of decision-makers, investors, and consumers expected to tune in. If those attending or watching any of the tournament’s 104 matchers over the next five weeks can be persuaded that new technology is elevating the experience, that could help Lenovo to be seen as a provider of AI-powered services and infrastructure rather than just a big PC company.

“The case study is vitally important, because if we can do it for FIFA, we can do it for anybody,” Jeff Shafer, Lenovo’s chief communications officer, told Nikkei Asia from the company’s offices in North Carolina, one of its two global headquarters. Added Arthur Hu, chief information officer, “The whole point is, we want to make solutions.”

If the business stakes weren’t high enough, Lenovo will also be tiptoeing around a potential political minefield. Public anxiety in the US around AI is mounting and in policy circles, warnings that Chinese tech companies could be exploited by Beijing for nefarious purposes are frequently voiced. Lenovo has occasionally been a political target before just for its PCs; the pivotal role its systems are due to play in crowd management and security at stadiums in 11 US cities could draw additional scrutiny.

“A Chinese company spending so much money to be visible on American soil, during an American-hosted tournament, is a show of confidence and of commitment,” said Chris Pereira, a former Huawei Technologies public affairs director now advising other Chinese companies looking to expand overseas.

“Whether Washington reads it as reassurance or provocation will depend entirely on which way the bilateral relationship moves between now and kickoff,” said Pereira, currently based in Singapore as head of consultancy group iMpact.

Lenovo officials have not disclosed how much the company is spending on the World Cup, but Sports Business Journal has reported that “the top-level FIFA deal likely represents a nine-figure commitment by the computer manufacturer,” or at least USD 100 million.

Other sponsors in Lenovo’s tier include Hyundai (including Kia), Coca-Cola, Adidas and Aramco. Two Chinese companies—appliance producer Hisense and Mengniu Dairy—are lower-level sponsors. Back in 2016, Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group became FIFA’s first Chinese top-level sponsor under a 14-year agreement, but the arrangement fell apart a few years ago in the wake of the country’s property market crash.

Lenovo is keen to rebrand as an AI company as its core business selling PCs, smartphones, and other devices has become increasingly commodified and low margin. Although it does not operate a large-scale cloud computing platform or market a proprietary large language model (LLM) of its own, Lenovo’s “hybrid AI” concept—combining AI-enabled personal devices, enterprise systems for companies and cloud management—has been picking up steam.

In May, Lenovo executives highlighted that 38% of the company’s total revenues the previous quarter came from AI-related operations, up from an implied 17% share a year and a half earlier. In dollar terms, AI revenues rose 171% over the same period, more than six times the pace of the company’s overall sales.

Lenovo “achieved hyper growth by capturing the opportunity of the booming AI infrastructure market,” Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO, said in the announcement of the company’s January-March results. “Through firm execution of our hybrid AI strategy, we are uniquely positioned to lead in the new wave of AI inferencing and democratization. With strong momentum across all our businesses, we are confident in our ambition to become a USD 100 billion company within the next two years.”

The market is beginning to listen to Lenovo’s AI story. Following the better-than-expected earnings release, DBS analyst Jim Au wrote that the report “confirms that Lenovo’s hybrid AI flywheel is working across all three engines: PC, infrastructure, and services.”

“Lenovo has now demonstrated that its AI infrastructure growth can convert into profit,” he wrote, affirming his “buy” rating on the company’s shares. “We also see a clearer monetisation path from AI PC software and services. … Investors can increasingly view Lenovo as an AI infrastructure and hybrid AI platform company rather than only as a PC hardware name.”

Such sentiments powered Lenovo’s share price to a 105.5% gain in May, the company’s best monthly performance in 27 years. But the World Cup constitutes a bigger test.

To drum up interest, Lenovo rented the Sphere, the showcase Las Vegas entertainment arena, during the CES trade show in January, and brought FIFA president Gianni Infantino on stage with Yang to give 14,000 attendees a taste of its new soccer tools, including an AI-powered system to automatically alert referees when players are offside and another to broadcast AI-stabilized footage from body cameras worn by on-field officials to put viewers in the center of the action.

“FIFA and Lenovo will fully embrace artificial intelligence, football AI, to support teams and players while also providing new mind-blowing experiences to fans worldwide,” Infantino said.

Lenovo is not a total rookie at sports. The Chinese company has been an official technology partner of Formula 1 racing since 2022 and previously sponsored individual F1 teams. It has also been the global technology partner of Italian soccer club Inter Milan since 2019.

But the scale of the 2026 World Cup will pose a far bigger challenge. Analysts with Bank of America, itself a FIFA sponsor, estimate that there will be more than 90 petabytes of direct tournament data to be processed. That would be 45 times more than at the 2022 Qatar World Cup and comparable to the likely global flow of data into YouTube over the tournament period. Adding in operational and broadcast data and simulations, data volumes at the 2026 World Cup could reach 2,000 petabytes.

“The 2026 World Cup is the first tournament where the data itself is a primary product,” the Bank of America analysts wrote.

“Artificial intelligence moves from a support tool to the control system,” they said. “Every team will use AI models, analyzing hundreds of millions of data points and 2,000+ performance metrics in real time. Digital twins of 16 stadiums, AI-run command centers across three countries, and 35-50m viewers per match push AI into a central operational role for the entire event.”

Lenovo now has to make sure all those systems work—and that spectators know that it was the company’s doing.

“This is a big deal,” said Jeffrey Towson, a management consultant who works with Chinese tech companies. “[Lenovo] can get some credibility and exposure as an AI company.”

Jing Jie Yu, an equity analyst with investment research company Morningstar, agrees that the sponsorship should bring financial returns for Lenovo.

“A strong showcase from Lenovo would be definitely accretive towards its brand equity, which plays well towards the company’s premiumization strategy for its devices,” Yu said, adding that she expected the company’s infrastructure services and server sales to gain business as well.

With an implicit eye on its own business services division, Alibaba Group announced a deal on May 29 to become the exclusive AI and cloud computing partner for the UEFA Champions League, Euro 2028, and two other European football competitions. Microsoft has a comparable relationship with the English Premier League.

“For Chinese consumer tech brands facing narrative battles in Western markets, sports has become what trade fairs were in the 1980s: the legitimate entry point into rooms where you would otherwise be unwelcome,” iMpact’s Pereira said. “The price tag is high, but so are the potential rewards.”

Lenovo has long positioned itself as a technological bridge between the US and China, maintaining what it describes as dual global headquarters in Beijing and North Carolina since buying IBM’s PC business in 2005. In 2014, it added on part of IBM’s server business and took over the Motorola phone brand from Google.

“Lenovo has a unique position within US-China relations, as the firm has a global manufacturing footprint and longstanding sales relationships with Western enterprise and consumer customers,” said Jacob Cooke, co-founder and CEO of consultancy WPIC Marketing and Technologies in Beijing.

Consequently, efforts by policymakers in both China and the US to separate the two countries’ technology industries over the last several years has sometimes put Lenovo in an awkward position. In recent months, both Palmer Luckey, founder of American defense contractor Anduril Industries, and the America First Policy Institute, a think tank closely linked to the administration of US President Donald Trump, have publicly criticized the American military’s continued use of Lenovo computers.

“Their headquarters has a flagpole with the CCP party flag and then the Lenovo logo under it. It’s nuts,” Luckey said last month during a talk at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, referring to the Chinese Communist Party by its English initials.

Yet despite such sentiments, the Americas continues to be Lenovo’s biggest market by revenue, generating a third of its global sales last year and 21% growth from the previous year.

Lenovo will be aiming to build on that momentum as well as to exploit the larger audience for World Cup games beyond the US Bank of America, which notes that 1.5 billion people watched the 2022 tournament final, estimates the championship could capture 7% of global internet traffic.

“It’s a very visible platform to showcase that Lenovo is not just selling computers and hardware,” said Mark Greeven, a professor of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School’s Shenzhen campus and director of its China Initiative. “It’s probably one of the best platforms to showcase AI capabilities.”

That is certainly what Lenovo is aiming for, said Shafer from the US headquarters, “If the only thing the world remembers is that the PC company Lenovo sponsored the World Cup, then we will have failed at delivering on our goal.”

This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It has been republished here as part of 36Kr’s ongoing partnership with Nikkei.