A sharp rise in consumption of tokens, or units of data processed by artificial intelligence (AI) models, is driving unprecedented demand for computing power across China, pushing rental prices higher and straining supply chains.
At the Mashan Computing Island in Wuxi City, east China's Jiangsu Province, an AI computing center is running at full capacity, operating around the clock to convert invisible tokens into tangible economic output.

"The sound we hear right now is the sound of 5,000 computing cards operating simultaneously. The sound signifies that under optimal conditions, 1.25 billion tokens can be generated every second. Based on current market value, it can generate 30,000 yuan (about 4,356.41 U.S. dollars) in economic value every minute," said Ji Lijun, general manager of New Power AI, a Wuxi-based technology company.
On a computing operation platform, different types of resources show varying levels of demand. Some of the most sought-after products are already sold out.

"This product has larger memory capacity. Customers prefer using this one for doing inference services with large models. So this type of resource is basically sold out now. It's unavailable for rental. Our customers are mostly from research institutions. There are also some university faculty or students who have their own computing power needs, or verification needs," said Jiang Dan, an AI computing product manager.
Rising downstream demand has pushed up rental prices. Since the third quarter of 2025, computing power rentals have climbed steadily.
In recent weeks, Alibaba Cloud and Baidu AI Cloud both announced price hikes for AI computing products, with increases reaching as high as 34 percent. Tencent Cloud has also adjusted pricing for certain models.

"We started doing computing power leasing in the second half of 2025. The total value of all contracts we signed over the past six months has amounted to 1 billion yuan. As of March, the new orders on hand for the entire 2026 fiscal year have already reached 1.4 billion yuan. Looking at the period from the third quarter of 2025 to now, overall computing power prices have risen by about 60 percent," said Sun Tao, chairman of CloudWorks Technology Holdings Limited.

Industry insiders said that China's AI sector is undergoing an unprecedented wave of commercialization in 2026, shifting from a price war of models to widespread application deployment.

"In terms of challenges, maybe the easy one is the AI compute that is always limited for everyone in the world and not just us. And especially for those companies like us, they are growing a lot and see a really strong customer demand. This really confirms the strong momentum of AI in general," said Giacomo Ficari, head of international business for Kimi, an AI chatbot of Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI.