China rolls out 'token factories' to drive AI economy

Open-source AI agents and the token economy emerge as major highlights at the exhibition segment of the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 17. [Photo for China Daily]

"With the rollout of Beijing's new policy, tokens are no longer just a technical term associated with large models. The token economy has officially entered a stage of industrial application and institutional development," said Liu Yong, president of the Beijing-based Zhongguancun Internet Finance Institute.

The Beijing action plan calls for building world-class token factories and establishing tiered evaluation standards, with throughput capacity, time to first token, power usage effectiveness and cache hit rate as core metrics, to ensure the large-scale supply of high-quality tokens.

A token factory can be thought of as the AI era's equivalent of a power plant. It integrates electricity, chips, data and models to directly produce tokens. Unlike traditional data centers that only rent out computing cards, customers no longer need to deploy models or optimize inference themselves. They simply pay for the tokens they use.