Copper Bull Information, accompanying the rise of the "morpheme economy"

Over a thousandfold growth in two years! China’s daily average token usage exceeds 140 trillion, officially positioning the AI era’s “word element economy” as a rising trend. [Taoguba]

Amid the AI boom, a concept’s importance is gradually becoming prominent—Token. It is the evaluation standard for large model call volume rankings and the billing unit for large model vendors’ packages. Recently, at the China Development High-Level Forum 2026 Annual Meeting, Liu Liehong, Director of the National Data Bureau, stated that “word element” tokens are not only a value anchor in the intelligent era but also a “settlement unit” connecting technological supply and commercial demand, providing measurable possibilities for business model implementation. From an official perspective, Token is translated as “word element.” He pointed out that at the beginning of 2024, China’s daily token calls were 100 billion; by the end of 2025, they surged to 100 trillion; by March this year, they exceeded 140 trillion, a two-year increase of over a thousand times. Since the end of January this year, some model companies have set records with 20-day revenues surpassing the total annual revenue of 2025. Behind these figures is a new business logic based on token billing that is accelerating its evolution. Liu Liehong stated that a new value system centered around token calling, distribution, and settlement is rapidly forming and has become an important path for monetizing the AI industry.

In other words, in the AI era, the token economy, or “word element economy,” is rising. In a recent interview, Huang Renxun expressed an optimistic outlook for the future of the token economy. He pointed out that “intelligence” itself is a scalable product, and soon there will be people willing to spend $1,000 to buy one million tokens. Recent media reports show that within tech companies like Meta and OpenAI, internal employee token consumption rankings have appeared. Additionally, on March 16, Alibaba officially established the Alibaba Token Hub (ATH) business group, focusing on “creating tokens, delivering tokens, and applying tokens.” (Cailian Press)

What is a token? It is the smallest semantic unit that AI large models use to understand and generate text. You can think of it as the “universal currency” in the AI world. That is, when you ask AI a question, the AI “thinks” using tokens; when the AI gives you an answer, it is “speaking” with tokens. For example, the phrase “I want to eat strawberries” typically consumes 4 to 5 tokens, depending on whether the AI model treats “strawberries” as a whole word or splits it into “straw” and “berries.” Punctuation also counts as a separate token. Generating tokens has costs, primarily in computing power and electricity. Some estimates show that a single interaction of “thank you” consumes about 0.0003 kWh of electricity. Recent data platforms indicate that China’s AI large models have maintained weekly call volumes surpassing those of the US for three consecutive weeks.

Tokens are the “oil of the new era”! China’s western regions have abundant wind, solar, and hydropower, but electricity itself is difficult to store and transmit across borders on a large scale. However, if we use China’s cheap electricity (0.3 yuan per kWh) to power data center GPUs, converting electricity into computing power products (i.e., tokens) and selling them to the US, it could be a highly profitable venture!