- The figure represents a more than 1,000-fold surge from the 100 billion daily token calls recorded in early 2024.
- The development of a national integrated data market is accelerating amid explosive growth in AI agents.
China's daily artificial intelligence (AI) token usage surpassed 140 trillion in March, surging more than 1,000-fold from 100 billion in early 2024, the National Data Administration said at a media briefing on Tuesday.
Compared to China’s AI token call volume of 100 trillion by the end of 2025, the latest data represents a growth of over 40%.
This indicates China's AI development has entered a phase of rapid growth with significantly enhanced industrial competitiveness, said Liu Liehong, head of the National Data Administration.
Tokens, the smallest unit of information processed by large language models, possess commercial characteristics that make them measurable, priceable, and tradable in the AI era.
A new value system centered on the usage, distribution, and settlement of tokens is rapidly evolving, emerging as a crucial pathway for the commercialization of the AI industry.
The administration is drafting policy documents for a national integrated data market and plans to accelerate the establishment of a unified national data property rights registration system, Liu said.
The agency has designated this year as the "Year of Unleashing Data Element Value," with policies aimed at resolving the conflict between data security compliance and efficient circulation.
By the end of 2025, China had built over 100,000 high-quality datasets totaling more than 890 petabytes, providing a solid foundation for high-quality AI development.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also launched an industrial data initiative in March, aiming to break bottlenecks in data collection and fully empower the development of new industrialization.
The number of active AI agents in China is projected to top 350 million by 2031, driving an average annual surge in token consumption of more than 30-fold, according to a forecast by market research firm IDC earlier this month.
As corporate IT budgeting logic shifts, tech giants like Alibaba are accelerating localized deployments to manage the cost pressures brought on by this exponential growth.
