China's AI Agent Patents Exceed 3,400 in 2025 Amid Rapid Computing Growth
In 2025, China's authorized patents for AI agents exceeded 3,400, growing at more than double the rate of the previous year. Additionally, the country's intelligent computing capacity reached 2.4 million PFLOPS by June 2026, while daily token usage surged to over 140 trillion by March 2026. This rapid expansion highlights China's accelerating AI ecosystem, where tokens are increasingly serving as the standard unit of measurement, settlement, and statistics for AI services. The massive growth in computing infrastructure and token usage reflects a transition from theoretical AI models to widespread, practical application deployment. The eight major computing hubs in China account for nearly 90% of the country's total intelligent computing resources. Furthermore, the combined output value of data software (including AI applications) and data resources (including token services) reached 4.99 trillion yuan in 2025, representing 73.6% of the total data industry.
## BACKGROUND
AI agents are autonomous software entities powered by large language models that can perceive their environment, make decisions, and execute tasks. A token is the basic unit of data (like a word or sub-word) processed by these models, and PFLOPS (petaflops) measures computing speed, representing one quadrillion floating-point operations per second.