🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

China is building a state-backed economy for AI tokens

• China Telecom’s move fits a wider push to make tokens a basic unit for AI commerce, including telecom carrier token operations programs 1.
• The government has coined an official term for tokens, “ciyuan,” and defines them as the settlement unit that connects technology supply with commercial demand 2.
• Token use has jumped from 100 billion in early 2024 to 140 trillion in March 2026, said China’s National Data Administration, the agency that oversees national data policy and infrastructure 1.
• Part of that scale comes from lower prices. Chinese AI firms such as MiniMax and Moonshot charge US$2 to US$3 per million output tokens, versus roughly US$15 for Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 1.

State carriers are becoming a distribution channel for China’s AI stack

• Carriers are also selling AI access through token packages instead of standard mobile data plans.
• China Telecom said it built two large language models with only domestically made AI chips and did not name the chips 3.
• DeepSeek-V4 runs in part on Huawei chips, and Huawei said its Ascend chips and related technology work with DeepSeek V4 models 4.
• China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom have folded DeepSeek models into their AI systems and infrastructure 5. No public statement here says private groups such as Alibaba and Tencent must follow that state-led setup 5.