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

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 other...

By Richard Chen,Christina Zhao