China's token consumption to reach 100 quadrillion in 2026, says report

China's annual token consumption is expected to reach 100 quadrillion this year, as the country's AI industry shifts its focus from competition in large models and computing power to the large-scale deployment and commercialization of AI agents, according to a new report.

AI is now entering a new stage of development in which AI agents are becoming a primary form of application, said a report titled "Research Report on AI Infrastructure Development in the Agent Era (2026)" released by the China Telecom Research Institute on Saturday.

AI agents are making complex AI technologies invisible and accessible, which allows individuals and enterprises to complete sophisticated, end-to-end tasks without mastering specialized technical expertise, it said.

Rao Shaoyang, director of the industry and enterprise strategy institute at the China Telecom Research Institute, said China's annual token consumption is expected to reach 100 quadrillion in 2026 and exceed 35 quintillion by 2030 – a compound annual growth rate of nearly 12-fold.

That is to say, roughly 274 trillion tokens are expected to be consumed a day in 2026, or about 3.2 billion tokens consumed every second, compared to over 140 trillion per day as of March this year.

The surge of AI agents will drive sustained, rapid growth in China's demand for computing power, said Rao. China's computing power demand is expected to increase by nearly tenfold annually over the next two to three years. In terms of the structure of that demand, inference computing will far outpace training computing, and by 2029, inference computing is projected to account for 80% of China's computing market.

Chinese companies are already preparing for the surge in token consumption.

Qian Ling, a chief expert at China Mobile, said the group has established two high-level management institutes for computing power and tokens, to coordinate the development of computing infrastructure and token consumption.

"We estimated that the average daily token output of China Mobile was about 3.4 trillion tokens last year, and the production capacity will for sure surpass that level this year," said Qian.

According to the global market research firm International Data Corporation, the number of active AI agents worldwide is expected to expand from roughly 28.6 million in 2025 to 79.4 million in 2026 and 2.216 billion by 2030.