Across social media sites, an image of a Temu warehouse on fire went viral. The captions for the image, including for a version shared in an X post viewed over 17 million times, claimed the fire happened at a warehouse in China and that the lost inventory was valued between only $56 and $250.
Temu, which is based in China, is an online retailer like Amazon. It’s known for selling cheap products of varying quality.
Some of the people replying to the posts and sharing the image believed it to be real. Some VERIFY readers texted us to ask if the image was real.
THE QUESTION
Is a viral image of a Temu warehouse fire real?
THE SOURCES
- Temu spokesperson
- Original person to have posted the image
- RevEye, a reverse image search tool
- VERIFY analysis of the image
THE ANSWER
No, a viral image of a Temu warehouse fire is not real.
WHAT WE FOUND
The viral image purportedly showing a Temu warehouse fire in China was generated with artificial intelligence. Temu has confirmed the image is fake.
“The claim of a fire at a Temu warehouse is entirely false,” a Temu spokesperson told VERIFY. “No such incident has occurred at any of our facilities.”
Additionally, there is a Grok watermark at the bottom right of the image. Grok is the AI generation tool on X.
VERIFY conducted a reverse image search of the image, and could not find a version older than the one posted to X on Dec. 29, 2024, by @DocAtCDI.
In an exchange with a commenter, user @DocAtCDI pointed out visual clues that the image had been generated with AI.
One X user replied to the post, saying that people are sharing the image on Facebook believing it to be real. In response, @DocAtCDI said the people believing it need to look more closely at the image because their “AI skills still can’t make letters work right.”
They’re referring to the text in the Temu logo at the center of the warehouse in the image. The text is distorted and looks more like “TEHU” than Temu. AI often struggles with text when generating images.
There is other evidence in the image itself that it was made with AI. The Temu logo as a whole is warped and does not look like the actual Temu logo.
In another reply to their post, @DocAtCDI called the image an “obvious joke.”