China experienced an exponential increase in daily artificial intelligence (AI) token calls in 2025, according to the National Data Resource Survey Report released on Wednesday. A token is the smallest unit a large language model uses when processing text.
According to the report, the average daily token calls in China surged from over 1 trillion at the beginning of 2025 to 100 trillion at the end of the year, with the 2025 total reaching 21,100 trillion.
"If we assume that each Chinese character corresponds to one token, then 21,100 trillion tokens are roughly equivalent to the characters from 29 billion copies of a typical Chinese dictionary. Last year, the volume of data used for AI inference surpassed the data used for AI training for the first time. In other words, large language models have truly entered people's daily lives and workplaces, gradually becoming a versatile and widely accessible tool," said Sun Yi, a professor from the School of Economics and Management at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The report shows that China is continuously deepening the development and utilization of public data resources. In 2025, both the volume of publicly available data and the volume of data licensed for commercial use increased by more than 30 percent year over year. "The 30 percent growth for public data openness is a high point in recent years. On the one hand, the large-scale promotion of AI and intelligent agent applications in the government sector has effectively facilitated the opening and development of public data. On the other hand, the national platform for public data resource registration has developed steadily and is gaining momentum. It has aggregated a vast amount of public data and provided fundamental guidance on public data ownership, trading, and pricing, thereby greatly stimulating the enthusiasm of government departments and public institutions at all levels for opening public data," said Zhang Xianghong, a member of the National Data Expert Advisory Committee.
The report also indicates that 90 percent of publicly available data is used to support enterprise applications. Businesses can integrate public data from tax, social security, market regulation, transportation, meteorological and other authorities with their own data in sectors like finance and transportation to develop risk control models or other high-value data products and services.
China sees exponential increase in daily AI token calls in 2025
