Blazing hot IPOs, an AI agent craze, and a new word for ‘token’: Here’s what’s happening in the world of Chinese AI

China now has a word for token: ciyuan. 

Liu Liehong, the administrator of China’s National Data Administration, the country’s main data regulator, unveiled the term at a State Council press conference in March, explaining that tokens were now “the settlement unit linking technological supply with commercial demand.” 

The National Data Administration disclosed that China now processes 140 trillion tokens every day, up from just 100 billion at the start of 2024. Chinese AI models have now surpassed U.S. models on OpenRouter, a popular marketplace for AI models. 

Investors have bought into the AI boom. IPOs in Hong Kong are at a five-year high thanks to a steady stream of Chinese AI and tech startups, including AI labs MiniMax and Zhipu AI, and chip designer Biren. 

“We believe that China is the big winner in this tech war for a number of reasons: valuation, wider adoption of AI, an advantage in power generation,” Mohit Kumar, Jefferies’ global macro strategist, told Fortune in mid-March at the bank’s Asia Forum in Hong Kong.

China’s goal is now to build a “token economy,” backed by a proliferation of efficient, open-source models and a push into real-world AI applications. Yet like their U.S. peers, Chinese firms are grappling with expensive research costs and heavy capital expenditure pledges, while also fending off Washington’s export controls, designed to keep them one step behind in the chip race.

The AI boom rescued China’s big tech companies from years of regulatory purgatory.

Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, has invested in open-source models, which can be downloaded and modified freely by developers. That low barrier to entry has made its Qwen models a compelling option for startups unwilling to pay for proprietary models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Qwen has won over developers from Southeast Asia to the Middle East, and it’s also convinced Western users too: Meta’s most recent model, Muse Spark, is trained partly off of Qwen.

Unlike Alibaba, ByteDance has largely kept its AI models proprietary, instead leveraging its product design and consumer experience strengths to win users. The company’s chatbot, also called Doubao, is China’s most-used AI app, with 100 million daily active users over the Chinese New Year holiday in February. 

Tencent, which operates the ubiquitous WeChat messaging platform, has been a step behind its rivals when it comes to AI. The company launched ClawBot in March, which appears as a contact within WeChat, allowing its over one billion monthly active users to connect directly with OpenClaw and execute tasks through the messaging interface.

Competition is fierce within China’s tech sector. Last week, Alibaba........

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