Artificial intelligence tokens — once a term familiar only to techies — are rapidly entering everyday life in China.
Banks, cafes, and telcos, among other small and big businesses, are offering free AI tokens as incentives to attract more customers. Some businesses are selling tokens much like mobile data plans, offering them as credit card rewards, or giving them out like free Wi-Fi.
An AI token is essentially a unit of computing that an AI model uses to process text. When a user asks a model a question or gives it an instruction, the words are broken down into small pieces called tokens, which the model processes to generate a response.
500 trillion Daily token consumption in China in mid-2026.
The massive popularity of AI has led to has sharply increase in token consumption globally. Daily token consumption in China surged to 500 trillion in mid-2026 from 100 billion in early 2024.
