Chinese businesses are giving away AI tokens with coffee, credit cards, and dumplings
Five unexpected ways computing power is entering everyday life in the country.
Chinese businesses are increasingly offering AI tokens as incentives to attract customers. These tokens, essentially units of computing used by AI models, are being given away with coffee, credit cards, and dumplings in various establishments. Banks, cafes, and telecom companies are among those participating in this trend.
An AI token represents the amount of computing power needed to process a piece of text. As the popularity of AI grows, so does the consumption of tokens, which has surged from 100 billion in early 2024 to 500 trillion daily in mid-2026. Chinese businesses are taking advantage of the lower costs of open-source and open-weight models, which can be up to 60% to 90% cheaper than those from U.S. rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Some businesses are selling tokens much like mobile data plans or credit card rewards, while others are giving them out like free Wi-Fi. For instance, Moonshot AI, a Chinese AI startup, partnered with the Agricultural Bank of China and American Express to launch a credit card named after its model Kimi. Cardholders earn Kimi AI tokens and agent and coding quotas on their spending.
Several Chinese banks are experimenting with token loan products to support AI startups, despite the challenge of assessing the financial status of these young companies using traditional metrics.
Written by urgent.news from Rest of World Tech's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
