China's demand for tokens—the basic units of text and code processed by AI models—is surging as the industry shifts from training large models to deploying AI agents at scale, according to a report from the China Telecom Research Institute. The report, titled "Intelligent Agent Era AI Infrastructure Development Research Report (2026)," was highlighted by CCTV News on September 12.
Explosive growth in token consumption
Rao Shaoyang, director of the institute's Industry and Enterprise Strategy Research Institute, said that China's annual token consumption is expected to reach 1 billion billion (10^16) in 2026, and exceed 350 billion billion (3.5×10^18) by 2030, implying a compound annual growth rate of nearly 12 times. This explosive growth is attributed to the rapid adoption of AI agents across industries.
Rao also noted that the surge in AI agents will drive sustained high growth in China's computing power demand, with an average annual increase of nearly 10 times over the next two to three years. In terms of demand structure, inference computing will far exceed training computing, with inference expected to account for 80% of China's computing power market by 2029.
Investment and global context
Data from the report shows that in 2026, China's top tech companies are expected to spend nearly 600 billion yuan (about $84.5 billion) on AI capital expenditure, representing over 10% of total social investment. International market research firms predict that the number of active AI agents globally will reach nearly 80 million in 2026, and 2.216 billion by 2030.
The report comes amid growing global attention on AI's potential risks. In the United States, bipartisan lawmakers have called for more government action following warnings from Anthropic researchers about AI posing an extinction risk to humanity. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue compared the situation to "an air-conditioning repairman talking about climate change," suggesting that AI researchers may be overly focused on extreme scenarios.
According to IThome, the report underscores a pivotal shift in China's AI landscape: the era of model training is giving way to an era of agent deployment and monetization. As agents become more prevalent, the demand for tokens—and the computing infrastructure to process them—will reshape the country's digital economy.
Based on reporting by IT之家. Edited and published in English by geisou.
