China is gaining ground in the global AI industry’s hottest commodity: tokens.
Since February, Chinese AI models made by groups such as DeepSeek and MiniMax have overtaken US rivals in token consumption, according to OpenRouter data, which tracks these units of text, code or data processed by large language models.
The shift points to a deeper change in the AI race, with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang saying this month that the production and use of the digital units will drive the AI economy. Because developers are charged per token, it doubles as both a proxy for adoption of models and a pricing battleground between AI companies.
As AI agents, such as those built on the open-source platform OpenClaw, consume vastly more tokens than earlier chatbots, the ability to cheaply produce tokens is reshaping global competition — and giving China a new edge.
“If your agent is burning through millions of tokens a day, even a small per-token price difference becomes a significant line item,” said Will Liang, chief executive of Amplify AI Group, a Sydney-based technology consulting firm. “That’s a structural tailwind for Chinese labs, and it only grows as agentic adoption scales.”
Chinese AI groups’ cost advantage stems from cheaper energy and more efficient models, allowing companies such as MiniMax and Moonshot to charge $2 to $3 per million output tokens, compared with about $15 for Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 — a near sixfold gap.
The difference becomes pronounced with AI agents, which consume far more tokens than chatbots. Summarising Shakespeare’s Hamlet might take about 30,000 tokens for a chatbot, but an AI agent can require up to 20mn on a minor coding task.
That is changing how AI developers choose to spend their money. Terry Zhang, a Hong Kong-based developer, said he now spends about $50 a day using Moonshot’s Kimi model for roughly 80 per cent of his work, reserving Anthropic’s Claude for more complex tasks.
“I used to call only Claude but now with an increasing amount of workload, using just Claude would cost me about $900 a day,” he said. “It’s too much and the mixed use of Kimi and Claude works well for me.”
The trend is feeding through to revenues. MiniMax, whose M2.5 model is now ranked among the most used globally by token consumption, has seen token usage rise 476 per cent from a month ago as of March 20, according to OpenRouter.
While OpenRouter accounts for only a fraction of the global model consumption, it is widely used as an industry indicator, as such data is scarce elsewhere.
US groups are still growing rapidly as the overall market expands, with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google all reporting strong revenue growth and adoption. But lower-cost Chinese models have obtained an opening to gain ground among users around the world.
China’s token pricing advantage stems partly from the country’s vast investment in renewable energy. The Chinese government this month designated “computing-electricity synergy” a national priority in its 2026 work report, explicitly linking energy policy with AI competitiveness.
On the software side, Chinese groups have embraced efficient AI architectures, such as a “mixture-of-experts” designs that reduce computational demand, sometimes at the expense of accuracy. This push for computing efficiency has been driven by a shortage of advanced chips in China due to US export controls.
There are technical constraints. Zhipu AI’s GLM-5 model briefly topped OpenRouter charts in February before usage surged beyond its compute capacity, causing delays and service degradation.
The company, which had to apologise and raise prices, saw its shares drop 22 per cent on the day, erasing more than $10bn in market value.
“The model’s capability matters, but stable compute and service are equally indispensable,” said one veteran developer at Google. Google’s Gemini 3 Flash is ranked second among the top five most-used models this month, trailing behind Minimax.
China’s tech giants have moved quickly to press their advantage. Earlier this month Alibaba announced the creation of Alibaba Token Hub, a new business group that will be led by chief executive Eddie Wu. The unit signals Alibaba’s view that token economics will define the next phase of AI competition.
“We are standing at the threshold of an AGI inflection point,” Wu wrote in an internal memo last week. “Billions of AI agents are poised to take on an ever-greater share of digital work, each powered by tokens generated by models, and these agents will increasingly become the primary interface between people and the digital world.”
Whether China’s token advantage can persist remains unclear, especially as some companies remain wary of relying on models run on Chinese data centres.
“The geopolitical headwinds are significant, particularly for governments and regulated industries,” said Amplify’s Liang. “Regulators are asking harder questions about where data is processed and under whose jurisdiction it falls.”
Data visualisation by Haohsiang Ko in Hong Kong