China Telecom Research Institute’s AI Infrastructure Development Research Report
(2026) forecasts China’s token consumption will reach 1×10^17 tokens in 2026 and
exceed 3.5×10^19 tokens by 2030; 2026–2030 cumulative growth is forecast at
350-fold, implying a CAGR of about 333% (≈4.3x/year). The report says the shift
from a model-and-compute race to large-scale agent deployment and monetization
will drive sustained, rapid compute demand growth, with China’s aggregate
compute demand expected to increase nearly tenfold per year on average over the
next 2–3 years. It also predicts inference compute will far outstrip training
demand, with inference accounting for roughly 80% of China’s compute market by
2029.
