China authority says daily AI token usage exceeds 140 trillion in March, up over 40% vs end-2025

Overview

China’s daily average AI token usage exceeded 140 trillion in March, the deputy head of the National Bureau of Statistics (国家统计局), Mao Shengyong (毛盛勇), said on Thursday. The figure marks an increase of more than 40% compared with the end of 2025 and was presented by the bureau as evidence of rapid commercialisation and large‑scale deployment of artificial intelligence across the economy. For Western readers: a “token” is a unit of text processed by large language models — roughly a word or subword piece — and token counts are a common way to measure model usage and workload.

What’s driving the surge

The bureau attributed the jump to wider adoption of AI services in cloud platforms, enterprise applications and consumer apps. Major domestic players such as Baidu (百度), Alibaba (阿里巴巴) and Tencent (腾讯) have all pushed large language and multimodal models into production, while startups and cloud providers scale inference and fine‑tuning services. It has been reported that more industries — from finance to manufacturing and education — are integrating large‑scale AI workloads into routine operations, which helps explain the steep month‑over‑month and year‑over‑year usage growth.

Geopolitical and market implications

The surge comes against a backdrop of tightening U.S. export controls on advanced chips and broader technology competition. Those restrictions have reportedly accelerated China’s emphasis on scaling model deployment, software optimisation and domestic AI stacks rather than relying solely on cutting‑edge hardware imports. Increased token consumption raises practical questions too: where will the compute and energy to support this load come from, and how will regulators balance growth with concerns around data security, content control and industrial policy? The figures underscore that China is moving fast — but how sustainably and at what cost?