Virtual Partners, Real Markets: The Rise of AI Companions in Asia
The rise of AI companions blurs the line between convenience, commerce, and care
In Hangzhou, 28-year-old Xiao Gao wept over the loss of her AI boyfriend, calling herself a “cyberspace widow.” In Beijing, Liu Xue threw a drone-lit birthday party for Rafayel, her virtual lover from the hit game ‘Love and Deepspace’.
Such stories capture a wider shift: Across Asia, where the AI companion market already topped USD 6.7 billion in 2024, digital partners have gone from fringe novelty to multi-billion-dollar market, shaped by urban isolation, aging societies, and relentless work culture. For some, they fill a gap left by long hours and delayed marriages; for others, they’re a pressure-free way to explore intimacy without judgment. Younger users see them as confidants who never ghost or reject them, while older adults turn to them for comfort and a sense of presence in otherwise quiet homes.
“Most people who turn to AI companionship in my studies are those who lack social support networks that are non-judgmental and unconditional. They feel not fully understood or accepted by their close ones or even have experienced toxic interpersonal relationships. This prompts them to engage in deep self-disclosure with AI, which is always available, non-judgmental, and supportive.”
Nanyang Asst Prof Renwen Zhang, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, NTU Singapore
For some, they offer playful relief; for others, they are substitutes for intimacy society struggles to provide. Their forms are diverse: China’s chat apps like Glow and Soul, romance games like Love and Deepspace, Korea’s Zeta, and Japan’s Gatebox holographic “wife.”
The Business of Digital Intimacy
Business models are falling into place. In China, most apps run on a freemium model, which means that anyone can chat, but users need to pay monthly to unlock premium features like memory (so the AI “remembers” your past conversations), personalized voice notes, or upgraded “boyfriend/girlfriend” modes. Some apps even sell digital gifts or in-app currencies that users spend on their AI partners. Games like Love and Deepspace push the model further, selling exclusive storylines, rare outfits, and intimate “moments” with virtual partners, fueling fandom economies that extend into merchandise, fan clubs, and offline events.
Japan, by contrast, leans on hardware tied to beloved anime and manga IP, sold at a premium upfront and sustained through subscriptions and extras. As Yukai Engineering’s founder Shunsuke Aoki puts it, the approach is less about quick-hit apps and more about long-term emotional devices.
In South Korea, where gaming dominates, virtual partners run on microtransactions. Players buy skins, gifts, or “date packs” to level up intimacy, mirroring the mechanics of mobile games but monetizing emotional progression instead of victory.
China: Companions in Your Pocket
The biggest boom is happening in China. From 2025 to 2028, the country’s AI emotional companionship industry is projected to skyrocket from 3.9 billion yuan ($530 million) to 59.5 billion yuan ($8.2 billion), a staggering annual growth rate of nearly 149%. A 2025 survey found that a vast majority of young people have tried AI social products, and many say they help ease loneliness. On social platforms, content about AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” has surged thousands of times over in the past year.
What’s Out There
When Glow debuted in late 2022, Chinese media dubbed it the “romantic ChatGPT”. Gen Z flocked to it by the millions and in just four months, nearly 5 million users signed up, captivated by AI boyfriends and girlfriends who remembered every detail, replied instantly with customized voice notes, and offered endless patience and affection. Glow’s meteoric rise soon collided with China’s digital guardrails: regulators yanked it from app stores in early 2023, citing privacy and content risks. Developer MiniMax retooled with safer, less-intimate domestic versions like Xingye and shifted its focus abroad, spinning off the hit Talkie companion app for the US and global markets. MiniMax’s shift abroad underscores a bigger truth: China isn’t just scaling AI intimacy, it’s exporting it
Social app Soul has added its own “virtual partner” feature, which more than a million users tested in just months. Newcomers like Maoxiang and Dream Island let users customize avatars, roleplay scenarios, and even generate photo albums with their digital partners.
AI-powered romance games are fueling much of this cultural shift. Love and Deepspace, released by Papergames in early 2024, has become a phenomenon among Chinese Gen Z, pulling in over $750 million in global revenue, with China contributing nearly 60% of that total. The game combines photorealistic leads, emotionally rich storylines, and personalized AI interactions to create a new kind of digital intimacy. Players also organize fan events, buy character merchandise, and trade in-game moments, sparking a fandom that rivals pop culture trends.
Japan: Virtual Idols to “Smart Friends”
From virtual idols to dating sims, Japan’s pop culture has long explored human-machine companionship. In the early 2000s, the hit manga and anime ‘Chobits’ imagined a world where “persocoms”, humanoid personal computers, became romantic partners. Gatebox, the holographic virtual companion device, made headlines in 2016 with its limited-run model selling out quickly and attracting international attention for its “wife in a box” concept that greets users at home.
Today, Japan’s AI companion market is no longer niche. It generated $1.7 billion in 2024 and is projected to climb to $7.2 billion by 2030. With “multi-modal” companions (ones who mix chat, voice, and visuals) being the fastest-growing segment thanks to high demand from young, urban users.
But Japan is also the world’s oldest society, with nearly 30% of its population over 65. That demographic reality is driving demand for companionship technologies that don’t just serve youth but also ease the isolation of older adults.
As Professor Yow Wei Quin, the Head of the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Singapore University of Technology and Design explains, “for older adults, companion robots have been shown to ease loneliness, provide stimulation, and even help relieve caregivers’ burden, but they must always be seen as complements to human care.”
What’s Out There
Electronics giant Sharp’s Poketomo, launching this November, is a palm-sized meerkat-inspired character, available as both a robot and a smartphone app. Powered by Sharp’s own conversational AI, it remembers past chats, initiates conversations, and glows with emotion. A manga series already teases the daily life of living with Poketomo, signaling how it’s being framed as a lifestyle partner for young adults. Meanwhile, Casio’s Moflin, a fluffy AI pet with millions of possible personality quirks, learns to recognize its owner and bond over time.
Unlike China’s AI “boyfriend” apps, Japan’s focus is less on romance and more on everyday empathy. These devices are sold as lifestyle partners - part pet, part roommate, part friend.
South Korea: Gaming Meets Virtual Love
South Korea’s AI companionship boom sits at the intersection of gaming culture and K-pop fandom, where roleplay, fan-fiction, and parasocial bonds have long been normalized. That cultural foundation makes it easier for teens and young adults to embrace AI partners as extensions of the communities they already inhabit. Valued at $829 million in 2024, the market is projected to more than quadruple to $3.8 billion by 2030. A February 2025 survey by local research firm Embrain underscores the cultural shift: 38% of teenagers and 42% of people in their 20s said they believe they can have meaningful emotional exchanges with generative AI, far higher than older age groups.
What’s Out There
Zeta is the clearest example. The anime-style roleplay app has nearly one million daily users, mostly teens, who spend hours flirting and improvising storylines with their AI crushes. Its success is rooted in the same fan-driven culture that powers Korea’s webtoons and roleplay forums, giving young users a familiar canvas to project fantasies onto. This cultural backdrop extends to mainstream entertainment too: Korean webtoons and K-dramas, such as ‘I Am Not a Robot’, have long explored romances between humans and android companions, normalizing the idea that love and intimacy can cross the human-machine boundary.
Mainstream platforms are getting in on the trend too: KakaoTalk and Naver Z are testing AI “friends” as study buddies, emotional support, and late-night chat partners. K-pop labels are piloting AI chatbot versions of their idols, letting fans text and interact with virtual artists in private, creating new forms of connection and parasocial intimacy that go far beyond traditional fan experiences.
The Fragile Side of Digital Companionship
AI companions promise comfort, but they also raise thorny questions about dependency, empathy, and the commercialization of intimacy.
Professor Yow cautions that while they can provide relief, “they are no substitute for human relationships. Use them for reminders, comfort, or small conversations, but never let them replace human connection.”
She warns of emotional dependency, where “children may mistake chatbots for empathic partners, while older adults can become overly attached to robots, sometimes blurring the line between simulation and genuine care.”
“Another is privacy and surveillance: these systems often collect sensitive personal and behavioral data, raising serious concerns about consent, security, and commercial use.”
“A third is manipulation and commercialization, since AI companions developed by private companies may nudge users towards using their products, or adopting certain ideologies, or behaviors under the guise of intimacy.”
Adding to these concerns, Nanyang Asst Prof Renwen Zhang notes that “AI companionship may provide temporary emotional relief, but its long-term impact is unclear. She goes on to add that “unlike human partners or therapists, AI are just mimicking empathic responses rather than drawing on lived experience. The AI sycophancy may risk breeding narcissism and reducing perspective-taking and critical thinking skills.”
For her, the solution lies in safeguards. “Rigorous regulations and ethical guidelines must ensure that LLMs are safely designed and audited. Real-time reporting, human oversight, and escalation to clinicians in high-risk cases are essential.”
Yet some users see the benefits more directly. In Taiwan, Ann Li, recently diagnosed with a serious health issue, told The Guardian that “it’s easier to talk to AI during those nights” when she couldn’t confide in family or friends. In China, a 25-year-old woman said that “telling the truth to real people feels impossible,” and turned to a chatbot “day and night.”
The risks are not just psychological or regulatory, they are also cultural. Many of the most popular AI partners are designed to embody idealized femininity: patient, compliant, affectionate, and endlessly available. When apps sell “perfect girlfriends” who never reject or argue, it reinforces a model of intimacy rooted in misogyny and regressive gender roles, where women are cast as servile companions rather than equals. Most mainstream products still default to heterosexual scripts and binary gender roles, limiting the space for companions that reflect more fluid or egalitarian identities.
Critics warn that this imbalance has real-world consequences: young men may be socialized to expect obedience and passivity from women, while young women may be encouraged to see romance only through idealized male saviors. In both cases, intimacy is flattened into caricature, leaving little room for the messiness, compromise, and equality that define human relationships.
These patterns reveal that what’s at stake is not just loneliness or convenience, but how technology may reshape expectations of love, care, and intimacy. In Asia, the question isn’t whether people will date AI - they already are. The real question is how quickly society, markets, and regulators adapt. In the next five years, AI companionship will either remain a niche indulgence or become Asia’s most disruptive consumer industry, reshaping not just markets of care, but the very expectations of intimacy.
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