At NVIDIA’s GTC conference in March, CEO Jensen Huang introduced the concept of the “token economy”, arguing that tokens are becoming the fundamental currency of the AI era. The cost and efficiency of generating tokens will determine the revenues, and ultimately the survival of technology companies.
In China, token consumption is growing at a rate of dozens of times a year. Data from the National Data Administration shows that China’s average daily token usage exceeded 140 trillion by March this year, up 1,400-fold from 100 billion at the beginning of 2024.
Demand for tokens is expanding at a tenfold or even hundredfold pace, while supply is struggling to keep up. The underlying computing infrastructure including chips, memory, networks and data centres, can only expand by tens of percentage points each year. The resulting shortage of computing capacity is pushing up the cost of tokens. For China’s leading tech companies, token costs are no longer a marginal expense that can simply be ignored. An urgent question is emerging: How much value are all these tokens actually creating?
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