Major Chinese telecom carriers are moving to expand their AI services business by promoting "AI tokens" as a new billing unit after mobile data. It is a push to shift their business structure beyond simply providing networks, toward selling access to AI model use itself as a bundle.

On May 18 local time, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that China Telecom has launched token-based AI pricing plans nationwide for general users, developers and corporate clients.

The plans are designed to separate everyday AI use from development and deployment demand. A plan for general users provides 10 million tokens for 9.9 yuan a month, while higher-tier plans offer up to 80 million tokens for 49.9 yuan a month. Corporate plans, which include coding and AI agent deployment features, range from 39.9 yuan to 299.9 yuan a month, with allowances of up to 250 million tokens.

Tokens are the basic unit of text, code and data that a generative AI model processes or produces. A certain amount of tokens is deducted each time a user asks a chatbot a question, requests a code change or uses image-generation functions. In general, 1 token corresponds to about 4 characters of text, or roughly three-quarters of a word.

China Telecom provides access not only to its own AI model, TeleChat, but also to external models such as Zhipu AI's GLM-5 and DeepSeek-V3.2. Stronger network connectivity and cybersecurity functions are offered as separate optional services.

Ke Ruiyuan, chairman of China Telecom, said in a statement that the company is shifting from a data-connection-focused business to a structure centered on intelligent services. He presented token operations as one of the core strategies.

Other Chinese telecom carriers are also expanding similar strategies. China Unicom's Shanghai branch launched token plans for customers, and China Mobile has also started selling related products in multiple regions since April. In Jilin province, a product offering 7.5 million tokens for 15 yuan a month has also emerged.

Telecom carriers' role is currently closer to that of an "AI platform aggregator" that bundles and sells access to multiple AI models. Independent AI companies, by contrast, maintain separate billing systems based on their own models. For example, DeepSeek charges 0.02 yuan per 1 million tokens for processing cached data and up to 2 yuan for generating new results, based on its DeepSeek V4-Flash model.

The move comes as AI usage in China surges. According to China's National Bureau of Statistics, daily token calls in China exceeded 140 trillion in March. That is about 1,000 times higher than in early 2024. Telecom carriers are trying to make tokens a standard billable unit, like cellular data in the past.

Amid this trend, revenue models in the telecom industry are changing. China Telecom has pulled AI services into telecom pricing by rolling out nationwide token-based products, while China Unicom and China Mobile are expanding regional experiments. As the traditional telecom model of selling data connections shifts toward selling AI services, the key competitive factor is expected to be which AI models can be bundled and offered at lower prices, and in what volume.