Cover Story: The AI Token Takeover in China

Cover Story: The AI Token Takeover in China

The token, the foundational unit that large language models use to process text, is becoming a key gauge of competitiveness in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry.

As coding tools and AI agents have grown more prevalent, demand for tokens is rising far faster than many company executives expected, setting off a contest across China’s AI industry over pricing, computing power, corporate clients and new layers of AI infrastructure.

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