China has a new word: ciyuan. It means token.
In March, Liu Liehong, administrator of China's National Data Administration, introduced the term at a State Council press conference, explaining that tokens were now "the settlement unit linking technological supply with commercial demand." The announcement was not just linguistic. It was a formal declaration that China is treating AI token consumption as an economic indicator, the same way it tracks kilowatt-hours of electricity or tonnes of steel.
The number behind the new terminology is extraordinary. China now processes approximately 140 trillion AI tokens per day - up from just 100 billion at the start of 2024. That is a thousand-fold increase in just over two years, equivalent to processing the entire holdings of 250 National Libraries of China in a single day.
What Is Driving the Surge
Three structural pillars explain the growth. China has the world's largest power supply system - 3.95 billion kilowatts of installed capacity with a rapidly expanding clean energy share, making AI compute genuinely affordable at scale. A government "AI Plus" initiative has driven enterprise deployment mandates, with an eight-ministry directive targeting 1,000 high-level industrial AI agents by 2027. And the explosive growth of agent-based deployment - where AI executes multi-step autonomous tasks rather than answering single questions - has multiplied per-user token consumption dramatically.
ByteDance's Volcano Engine platform alone processed 120 trillion tokens daily by April, up from 120 billion when it launched in May 2024. The company's OpenClaw agent framework has been a major driver of individual usage growth. China's AI models have now surpassed US models on OpenRouter for five consecutive weeks. All six of the most-used AI models globally in the latest weekly data were made in China, with Alibaba's Qwen models occupying two of the top three spots.
The Investment Boom
The token economy is attracting capital. Hong Kong IPOs are at a five-year high, fueled by AI and tech startups including labs MiniMax and Zhipu AI and chip designer Biren. China's cloud economics are being rewritten - the Model-as-a-Service market, worth 710 million yuan in 2024, is projected to reach 30% of total cloud revenue at major providers by end of 2026.
The gap between China and the US in AI model usage globally is narrowing faster than most Western analysts expected. The constraints remain real - US chip export controls limit access to the most advanced GPUs, forcing reliance on Huawei hardware and creative workarounds. But at the application layer, the token economy data suggests Chinese AI deployment has moved from catching up to competing on equal terms in many categories - and leading in others.
