China’s telecoms giants bet on ‘token factories’ as AI drives revenue growth
China’s three state-owned telecoms giants have made billable artificial intelligence tokens a key focus of their growth strategies, as AI adoption accelerates across the country and computing demand soars. China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom all pointed to AI and computing operations as key growth drivers in their first-half financial disclosures released this month, presenting usage of…
China's state-owned telecom giants – China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom – are prioritising artificial intelligence (AI) tokens as a crucial growth strategy. With AI adoption surging across the nation, these firms see AI and computing operations as pivotal drivers of revenue growth. In their first-half financial reports, all three companies highlighted AI-related metrics alongside traditional indicators like compute power and data usage.
China Telecom reported a remarkable 95% surge in intelligent computing revenue during the first half of the year, resulting in a 7.1% increase in their overall "intelligent business" revenue to 31.1 billion yuan (approximately $4.6 billion). The company introduced token packages for mobile users nationwide and upgraded its Xingchen TokenHub platform, hosting 142 large language models and over 420 industry-specific AI applications.
They also enhanced Xirang, their software for orchestrating compute resources and networks, expanding support to more than 20 chip architectures.
China Unicom's computing-power revenue grew by 13%, reaching 41.9 billion yuan, driven by its "token supermarket" and its UniAI platform connecting more than 200 large language models. Their capital expenditure on compute infrastructure increased by over 80% year-on-year in the first half of 2026, accounting for more than a third of the firm's total expenditure.
China Mobile, which reported on August 13, recorded 52.9 billion yuan in computing-services revenue, up 14%, while AI-services revenue rose marginally by 0.9% to 49.3 billion yuan. Combined, computing and AI services contributed to 22.6% of the company's total revenue. High-performance computing revenue for model training and running grew over 130% to 5.3 billion yuan.
The telecom giant outlined a "token factory" strategy, integrating models, compute capabilities, and data centre capacity, alongside regional pilots for token products and its MoMA platform offering enterprise users access to multiple AI models.
Written by urgent.news from SCMP Tech's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
