China’s three major state-owned telecommunications companies are focusing heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) tokens as a primary strategy for growth, amid rising demand for AI and computing across the nation. China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom have highlighted AI and computing operations as essential growth drivers in their financial disclosures for the first half of 2026.
China Telecom reported a significant 95 percent increase in intelligent computing revenue during the first half of the year, leading to a 7.1 percent rise in its overall “intelligent business” revenue, which reached 31.1 billion yuan (approximately US$4.6 billion). The carrier emphasized its token packages available to mobile users nationwide and announced an upgrade to its Xingchen TokenHub platform, which now supports 142 large language models and over 420 industry-specific AI applications.
Furthermore, China Telecom has enhanced its orchestration software, Xirang, to support more than 20 chip architectures, with its cloud revenue also seeing a 7.8 percent growth to 61.8 billion yuan. Meanwhile, China Unicom disclosed earnings showing a 13 percent increase in computing-power revenue, totaling 41.9 billion yuan, driven by its data centers, leased computing services, business software, and cloud-based AI offerings.
In its filing, China Unicom introduced a “token supermarket,” designed as part of an end-to-end ecosystem for creating, transferring, storing, and utilizing AI tokens. The company stated its UniAI platform now connects over 200 large language models and has accumulated more than 500 terabytes of high-quality data. Unicom’s capital expenditure on computing infrastructure surged over 80 percent year-on-year during the first half of 2026, representing more than a third of the company’s total capital expenditure.
China Mobile, which initiated the telecom reporting cycle, reported 52.9 billion yuan in computing services revenue, marking a 14 percent increase. Its AI services revenue increased slightly by 0.9 percent to 49.3 billion yuan, with computing and AI services together accounting for 22.6 percent of its principal business revenue. Notably, revenue from high-performance computing, essential for training and running AI models, grew by over 130 percent to 5.3 billion yuan.
China Mobile is implementing a “token factory” strategy that integrates models, computing, and data center capacity, alongside regional token product pilots and its MoMA platform, which provides enterprise users with access to multiple AI models. However, none of the three telecom operators disclosed specific figures regarding standalone token revenues, active customer counts, or monthly consumption metrics.
Private firms are also capitalizing on the move toward a token economy. Phancy Group, formerly known as 4Paradigm, reported a staggering 860 percent increase in revenue from its application programming interface services, which facilitate direct connections between external enterprise applications and hosted AI models, reaching 460 million yuan. This surge corresponds with a 620 percent rise in token consumption.
According to China’s National Data Administration, the average daily AI token calls in the country exceeded 140 trillion in March 2026, a significant increase from just 100 billion two years prior. This figure translates to about 100,000 tokens per person, based on China’s population of approximately 1.4 billion.
Featured image credit
