ZTE President: AI Traffic Surge Brings Token Billing Challenges

At the 2026 China Unicom Partner Conference, ZTE President Xu Ziyang said data traffic surges have happened three times in history, solved by different technologies each time. Now AI is causing another surge, with three key differences.

First, traffic now serves machines, not just people. Nearly 60% of China's internet traffic this year serves machines. AI agents are moving from virtual to real, creating huge demand for cloud-edge-device connections. Second, billing is shifting from bits to Tokens. Token usage has grown a thousand times in one to two years. Xu says Tokens from different AI models have different values, so there may be an exchange rate between high-value and ordinary model Tokens. Carriers need to study this further.

Third, AI needs frequent context delivery, putting great pressure on 5G uplink and downlink traffic. Edge agent coordination also requires deterministic networks with very low latency.