China’s telecoms giants bet on ‘token factories’ as AI drives revenue growth

China’s three state-owned telecoms giants have made billable Artificial Intelligence tokens a key focus of their growth strategies, as AI adoption accelerates across the country and computing demand soars.China-mobile" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="23436" data-entity-type="organization">China Mobile, China-telecom" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="15182" data-entity-type="organization">China Telecom and China-unicom" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="23437" data-entity-type="organization">China Unicom all pointed to AI and computing operations as key growth drivers in their first-half financial disclosures released this month, presenting usage of tokens – the fundamental unit of data processed by AI models – as a central metric alongside others such as compute power and data.On Thursday, China-telecom" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="15182" data-entity-type="organization">China Telecom announced it had recorded a 95 per cent surge in intelligent computing revenue during the first half of the year. That drove a 7.1 per cent increase in its broader “intelligent business” revenue to 31.1 billion yuan (US$4.6 billion).