Beijing plans to increase its intelligent computing power to over 130,000 petaflops by late 2026 and implement new policies for its "token economy," accelerating AI adoption to compete with the US in the tech race.
SenseTime CEO Xu Li predicts a significant shift in AI commercialization from a 'token economy' to a 'task economy' as token prices decline. He states that future value will lie in users paying for complex, completed tasks rather than raw computing usage, expanding the market tenfold beyond programmers to the masses.
AI tokens are becoming the basis for delivering and pricing AI services in China, evolving beyond a technical metric. Daily AI token consumption has surged over 1,000-fold since early 2024, reaching 140 trillion in March.
China's daily token consumption has reached 140 trillion, up from 100 billion just two years ago, reflecting a striking scale of growth. Under the AI Plus framework, Beijing is embedding AI across industries while using tokens as a 'value anchor' and 'settlement unit' to upgrade western regions that have historically functioned as energy suppliers to the industrialized east.
