The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) said
daily token calls in China rose from about 100 bln at the start of 2024 to 140
tln by end‑March 2026, an increase of over 1,000x. CAICT vice president Wei
Liang said tokens — the units large models use to process information and
measure model invocation cost — are spawning a new token economy. The
multi‑round model invocations driven by agent-scale applications are sharply
increasing AI compute demand and are prompting the development of token
metering, scheduling, pricing and trading models.
