China's AI Token Consumption Surges to 140 Trillion Daily
Source: Scmp
China's token consumption nearly doubled in three months (100T to 140T between December and March), signaling aggressive buildout of inference infrastructure across government, enterprise, and consumer applications. The scale dwarfs Western deployment rates. The jump from 100B tokens in early 2024 to 140T in March 2026 indicates China has resolved supply chain constraints around chips and power that plagued earlier scaling efforts, likely through state coordination of data center placement and domestic chip manufacturing advances. Token throughput directly translates to real economic activity: customer requests, policy analysis, industrial automation. China's trajectory suggests it will own the largest AI inference market by operational scale within two years.