China’s telecoms giants bet on ‘token factories’ as AI drives revenue growth

The country’s ‘big three’ telecoms operators are investing heavily in AI computing capacity, as they cash in on a surge in token usage

China’s three state-owned telecoms giants have made billable artificial intelligence tokens a key focus of their growth strategies, as AI adoption accelerates across the country and computing demand soars.

China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom all pointed to AI and computing operations as key growth drivers in their first-half financial disclosures released this month, presenting usage of tokens – the fundamental unit of data processed by AI models – as a central metric alongside others such as compute power and data.

On Thursday, China Telecom announced it had recorded a 95 per cent surge in intelligent computing revenue during the first half of the year. That drove a 7.1 per cent increase in its broader “intelligent business” revenue to 31.1 billion yuan (US$4.6 billion).

The company said it had also upgraded Xirang, its orchestration software for compute resources and networks, extending support to more than 20 chip architectures. Meanwhile, China Telecom Cloud revenue rose 7.8 per cent to 61.8 billion yuan.

China Unicom, which reported earnings on Tuesday, posted 41.9 billion yuan in computing-power revenue – a 13 per cent increase across data centres, leased compute, business software and cloud-based AI.

In its filing, Unicom pointed to its launch of a “token supermarket” – part of an end-to-end ecosystem to create, transfer, store and use AI tokens. Its UniAI platform connected more than 200 large language models and collected over 500 terabytes of high-quality data, it said.