China's data bureau discusses 'token economy' to boost data value

China's National Data Bureau held a meeting on May 22 to discuss the 'token economy,' gathering experts from universities and representatives from companies like Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, Moonshot AI, and others. The goal is to promote healthy growth of token economy and unlock the value of data. Tokens are the smallest units for processing text, code, images, audio, and video in large AI models, now becoming the standard unit for measuring, billing, and tracking AI services. The bureau plans to make token economy a key focus, using better data sets and computing networks to push market reforms for data. By March 2026, China's daily token usage hit over 140 trillion, up 1,000 times from early 2024.