Tokens – China's next "gold mine"?

In an apartment in Southeast Asia, a designer taps their phone screen, asking artificial intelligence (AI) to sharpen a blurry photo, soften the lighting, and remove cluttered backgrounds. This seemingly simple operation is actually part of a new Chinese export – a chain of AI “tokens” generated by servers located in China and sold as a digital service to users abroad.

Inside a data center in China. Photo: Shutterstock

Tokens are the basic unit of AI, consisting of words, characters, and code snippets that large language models (LLMs) use to process and generate text. Just as streaming video consumes megabytes, asking an AI chatbot to write an essay, debug code, or create images also consumes tokens. One token is equivalent to approximately four characters; a high-resolution image can cost between 200 and 1,000 tokens, while one million tokens is equivalent to the length of the entire Harry Potter series.

According to the People's Daily online, Shantou port city (Guangdong province) became the first in China to complete a closed-loop verification process for token exports in April. This process includes building overseas data centers, creating tokens, providing overseas application programming interface (API) requirements, and transmitting cross-border data in accordance with state regulations.

This is part of China's ambition to transform domestic electricity, data centers, and large-scale language modeling capabilities into high-value export products. Under this model, servers are located within China's smart computing centers, and what "crosses the border" is AI services – inference results provided by APIs – thereby turning "token exports" into a new form of service commerce.

According to analysts, the aforementioned experiment shows how China is trying to restructure its export-oriented economy for the AI ​​era, thereby providing Chinese telecommunications companies and technology firms with new business opportunities. In late April, China Telecom announced a series of pilot token plans, offering consumers monthly AI usage packages starting at 9.9 RMB (approximately $1.46) per month with 10 million tokens. Small businesses and developers can purchase enterprise packages for 39.9 RMB per month with up to 150 million tokens.

Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant, has also just announced a new token business group, viewing tokens as strategic assets and setting three objectives: creating, transferring, and applying tokens. Alibaba said it will invest more than 380 billion yuan over three years to build a global cloud computing network to support token exports.

Rao Shaoyang, director of the China Institute of Telecommunications Research, said these efforts are changing the nature of China's digital globalization. According to Rao, China's digital industry previously expanded overseas through complete applications, software, or systems. But now, exporting tokens allows foreign customers to directly utilize the inference capabilities, interfaces, and intelligent services of Chinese models.

For his part, Liu Xiaoge, Deputy Director of Research at the Development Research Center under the State Council of China, commented: “In the context of China’s traditional trade facing geopolitical and tariff challenges, token exports offer a new way to offset risks from traditional trade conflicts and boost the growth of services trade. They will reshape the position of China’s digital services in the global value chain.”

According to data from China's National Bureau of Statistics, the number of tokens used daily in the East Asian country in March was over 140 trillion, 1,000 times more than at the beginning of 2024.

TRI VAN (Compiled)

Source: https://baocantho.com.vn/token-mo-vang-tiep-theo-cua-trung-quoc-a206064.html