The rise of the AI ‘token economy’ and China’s big bet on scale

SINGAPORE: The future of artificial intelligence may hinge on something surprisingly small. Not huge data centres or the latest wave of AI agents, but tiny units of data called tokens, which AI models use to process information and generate responses. Just like how electricity is measured in kilowatt-hours and mobile data in gigabytes, tokens are increasingly becoming the unit used to measure and price AI services. And as AI adoption accelerates worldwide, governments and tech companies have been paying closer attention. China, in particular, has been rapidly expanding its AI infrastructure to support rising token consumption, observers say – underscoring…