- China's cumulative AI token usage reached about 21.1 quadrillion in 2025, with the daily average experiencing a hundredfold explosive growth within the year.
- As the number of AI agents surges, China is accelerating the development of a unified national data market.
China's artificial intelligence (AI) token usage reached about 21.1 quadrillion in 2025, signaling that the country's AI industry has entered a period of rapid expansion.
The data was officially released at the 9th Digital China Summit, highlighting the country's strong growth momentum in the AI sector.
The National Data Resource Survey Report (2025) showed that the country's daily average token usage soared from over 1 trillion at the beginning of last year to 100 trillion by year-end.
By March 2026, this daily average had surpassed 140 trillion, representing a jump of more than 40% compared to the end of last year.
tokens are the smallest units of information processed by large AI models, and they have now become the value anchor and commercial settlement unit in the intelligence era.
token usage not only reflects model activity but is also a key indicator for assessing the actual value-creation capability of the AI industry, said Liu Liehong, head of the National Data Administration.
To support massive computing demands, China is stepping up the preparation of policy documents for a unified national data market and plans to accelerate the establishment of a unified data property rights registration system.
By the end of 2025, China had built over 100,000 high-quality datasets with a total scale exceeding 890 PB, laying a solid foundation for AI development.
In 2025, the total volume of data used for AI training and inference in China stood at 199.48 EB.
The number of active AI agents in China is expected to top 350 million, driving an average annual surge in token consumption of more than 30 times, according to a forecast made early last month by market research firm IDC.
Facing cost pressures brought by exponential growth, tech giants such as Alibaba and Tencent are accelerating localized deployments to optimize their business models.
