China's Daily AI Token Calls Surge 1,000-Fold in Two Years
China's daily large language model token calls have expanded 1,000-fold over the past two years, reflecting a massive surge in AI adoption. This surge pushed power consumption in the internet data services sector past 60 billion kilowatt-hours this year, a year-over-year increase of more than 40%. The exponential growth in token volume demonstrates that AI applications in China are transitioning rapidly from experimental tools to core operational workloads. However, it also highlights the immense energy burden AI infrastructure places on power grids, driving national initiatives toward compute-power energy synergy. By the end of July 2026, China's total intelligent computing capacity reached 245 million PFLOPS. Over 85% of this capacity is concentrated within eight national computing hubs and three compute-power synergy development zones.
## BACKGROUND
Tokens represent the basic atomic units of text processed by large language models, making token volume a key metric for measuring real-world AI usage. Computing scale is often measured in PFLOPS, which denotes quadrillions of floating-point operations per second. To sustain this energy-intensive expansion, China is promoting compute-power synergy (算电协同) to align green renewable electricity directly with large data center hubs.