China's daily AI token calls surpass 175 trillion, government center says
A report from a center under China's industry ministry says inference token use has overtaken training data use for the first time.
China's daily average AI token calls have exceeded 175 trillion, more than 1,000 times the level recorded in early 2024, according to a report released on November 1, 2026 by the China Information Industry Development Center, a government center under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The South China Morning Post reported the findings.
The report also said inference-stage token usage in China surpassed model-training data usage for the first time. It did not disclose how much data was actually used for AI training in China.
Government bodies have signalled that inference demand will keep growing. In April 2026, the National Data Administration estimated that compute demand for AI inference could eventually reach three times training demand. Local governments including Beijing plan policies to boost token consumption through token factories and token distribution platforms.
Companies are also moving on token use. In June 2026, Alibaba Group set up an organization called "Token Foundry" to expand internal token consumption and commercialize it externally, and last month DeepSeek open-sourced its DeepInfra framework to improve model running efficiency and cut compute costs.
Separate estimate and spending forecasts
On October 23, 2026, the China Information and Communication Research Institute issued a separate report estimating daily average token consumption at about 500 trillion as of June when private cloud usage is included.
Rhodium Group has forecast that AI infrastructure capital spending by 13 major Chinese companies will more than double to 932 billion yuan this year and exceed 1.2 trillion yuan in 2027. Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu posted a combined free cash flow deficit of 16 billion yuan in the first half of 2026, while Alibaba's AI cloud and computing services revenue for the quarter ended in June rose 45% year-on-year to $7.1 billion.
Quick answers
How many AI token calls does China handle per day?
China's daily average token calls exceeded 175 trillion, according to a report released on November 1, 2026 by the China Information Industry Development Center.
What did the report say about inference versus training?
It said inference-stage token usage in China surpassed model-training data usage for the first time, but did not disclose how much data was used for AI training.