en.Wedoany.com Reported - Wei Liang, Vice President of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), recently disclosed on the CCTV financial program "China Economic Lecture Hall" that as of the end of March 2026, China's daily token calls had surged to 140 trillion, representing an over 1,000-fold increase from approximately 100 billion at the beginning of 2024. Tokens, the basic units for processing information and measuring model call costs in large models, are considered the most intuitive "barometer" of the development of the artificial intelligence industry, with their exponential growth in call volume.
The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) is a scientific research institution directly under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and one of the most important supporting research organizations in the field of information and communications in China. It has long been responsible for policy research, technical standard formulation, and industry monitoring in the sector. The data disclosed comes from CAICT's continuous monitoring of the operational trends of the AI industry.
Wei Liang pointed out that the large-scale application of AI agents is giving rise to a new economic form—the "Token Economy." Unlike the previous model of single-model calls, in the era of AI agents, a single user instruction may trigger multiple rounds of model calls and resource consumption. This "cascading" call mechanism directly drives the explosive growth in demand for AI computing power. As AI agents increasingly penetrate industries such as office work, manufacturing, healthcare, and finance, a series of new business models are emerging around the measurement, scheduling, pricing, and trading of tokens.
Industry data shows that China's daily token calls had reached approximately 100 trillion by the end of 2025, meaning a growth of over 40% in the first quarter of 2026 alone. According to CAICT's monitoring, enterprise-level token calls on China's public cloud reached 2,000 trillion in 2025, an increase of more than 16 times from 114 trillion in 2024.
The explosive growth in token calls reflects that China's AI industry has accelerated from a model training-dominated phase to a new stage of large-scale inference application deployment. As AI application scenarios continue to deepen, tokens, as the core "measurement unit" of the AI era, will further highlight their economic value and strategic significance.
