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Richard Chen

Christina Zhao

China’s three state-owned telecoms giants have made billable artificial intelligence tokens a key focus of their growth strategies, as AI adoption accelerates across the country and computing demand soars.
China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom all pointed to AI and computing operations as key growth drivers in their first-half financial disclosures released this month, presenting usage of tokens – the fundamental unit of data processed by AI models – as a central metric alongside others such as compute power and data.
On Thursday, China Telecom announced it had recorded a 95 per cent surge in intelligent computing revenue during the first half of the year. That drove a 7.1 per cent increase in its broader “intelligent business” revenue to 31.1 billion yuan (US$4.6 billion).
The carrier highlighted the token packages it now offered to mobile users nationwide, as well as a recent upgrade to its Xingchen TokenHub platform, which hosts 142 large language models and more than 420 industry-specific AI applications.
The company said it had also upgraded Xirang, its orchestration software for compute resources and networks, extending support to more than 20 chip architectures. Meanwhile, China Telecom Cloud revenue rose 7.8 per cent to 61.8 billion yuan.
China Unicom, which reported earnings on Tuesday, posted 41.9 billion yuan in computing-power revenue – a 13 per cent increase across data centres, leased compute, business software and cloud-based AI.
In its filing, Unicom pointed to its launch of a “token supermarket” – part of an end-to-end ecosystem to create, transfer, store and use AI tokens. Its UniAI platform connected more than 200 large language models and collected over 500 terabytes of high-quality data, it said.


Underscoring its aggressive expansion plans, Unicom’s capital expenditure on compute infrastructure surged by more than 80 per cent year on year in the first half of 2026, and accounted for more than one-third of the firm’s total capex.
China Mobile, which kicked off the telecoms reporting cycle on August 13, logged 52.9 billion yuan in computing-services revenue during the first six months, up 14 per cent, while AI-services revenue edged up 0.9 per cent to 49.3 billion yuan.
Computing and AI services combined accounted for 22.6 per cent of China Mobile’s principal business revenue over the period. High-performance computing revenue used to train and run models grew over 130 per cent to 5.3 billion yuan.
China Mobile outlined a “token factory” strategy combining models, compute and data-centre capacity, alongside regional token-product pilots and its MoMA platform, which gives enterprise users access to multiple AI models.
None of the three operators disclosed stand-alone token revenues, active customer counts, monthly consumption metrics or profit margins.
State carriers are not alone in monetising this shift towards a token economy.
Chinese AI solutions provider Phancy Group, formerly known as 4Paradigm, said revenue from its application programming interface services – which allow external enterprise applications to connect directly to the AI models it hosts – had surged over 860 per cent year on year to 460 million yuan, as token consumption rose about 620 per cent.
According to China’s National Data Administration, domestic average daily AI token calls surpassed 140 trillion in March, up from just 100 billion two years earlier. That is equivalent to roughly 100,000 tokens per person based on the country’s population of about 1.4 billion.


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The country’s ‘big three’ telecoms operators are investing heavily in AI computing capacity, as they cash in on a surge in token usage


The country’s ‘big three’ telecoms operators are investing heavily in AI computing capacity, as they cash in on a surge in token usage.


China’s telecoms giants bet on ‘token factories’ as AI drives revenue growth

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The country’s ‘big three’ telecoms operators are investing heavily in AI computing capacity, as they cash in on a surge in token usage

The country’s ‘big three’ telecoms operators are investing heavily in AI computing capacity, as they cash in on a surge in token usage