TechFlow News, March 24: According to a report by the People’s Daily cited by the official WeChat account of the Chinese government website, sources at the National Data Administration revealed that China’s average daily token volume stood at 100 billion at the beginning of 2024; by the end of 2025, it will surge to 100 trillion; and as of March this year, it has already surpassed 140 trillion—representing over a thousand-fold increase in just two years.
Earlier, on January 28, the People’s Daily published an article titled “Casual Talk on Tokens (New Knowledge),” introducing “token” as the official Chinese translation for the AI concept “Token.” A token is the smallest unit of information processed by large models and possesses distinctive features of the intelligent era: measurability, priceability, and tradability. Currently, a new value system centered on token invocation, distribution, and settlement is rapidly evolving and emerging as a critical pathway for commercializing the AI industry. The substantial growth in China’s average daily token volume also reflects that, with the deepening reform of market-oriented allocation of data resources, a high-quality AI data supply system is taking shape, and a virtuous cycle of “data supply → value realization” is beginning to emerge.
