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Xinmei Shen

The Chinese city of Changzhou is building what it claims will be the country’s first city-level “green token factory”, as local governments race to answer Beijing’s call to power massive artificial intelligence computing demands with clean energy.
The project would be powered by green energy and could produce 60 trillion tokens per year once completed, the municipal government said in a statement on Sunday during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.
The city in the eastern Jiangsu province did not provide a timeline for completion of the initiative.
The facility would connect directly to renewable energy plants under a national policy that allowed green power to bypass public grids, the statement said.
The design aims to optimise power usage, with token output expected to rise 62.5 per cent using the same computing power resources, significantly enhancing token supply efficiency and economic viability.
The agreement, signed on Saturday, involves seven parties including Alibaba Cloud and Wangsu Science and Technology, a provider of information infrastructure platform services. Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the South China Morning Post.
Tokens are the basic unit through which AI services are measured and billed. The token factory concept was popularised by Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang last year, referring to a new generation of AI data centres designed to maximise token output with efficient computing power and energy usage.
A number of token factory projects have sprung up across China amid soaring token usage created by the AI boom.
China’s daily AI token consumption had surged more than 1,000-fold in just over two years, rising from around 100 billion tokens a day in early 2024 to 100 trillion by the end of last year, the National Bureau of Statistics said in March.
Beijing Yihao, the first token factory project in the capital city of Beijing, was completed last month and had reached a daily production capacity of more than 1.4 trillion tokens, the municipal government said earlier this month.
Its long-term goal was producing 10 trillion tokens per day, it said.
Wenzhou, in the eastern Zhejiang province, said last week it had launched the Southeast Token Operation Centre, utilising the coastal city’s new energy system built in recent years based on resources including nuclear, wind and water.


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Project is expected to churn out 60 trillion tokens a year, driving the country’s AI clean-power ambitions forward


Project is expected to churn out 60 trillion tokens a year, driving the country’s AI clean-power ambitions forward.


Changzhou says it is building China’s first city-level clean-power AI token factory

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Project is expected to churn out 60 trillion tokens a year, driving the country’s AI clean-power ambitions forward

Project is expected to churn out 60 trillion tokens a year, driving the country’s AI clean-power ambitions forward