Agent · Fortune Technology
Blazing hot IPOs, an AI agent craze, and a new word for ‘token’: Here’s what’s happening in the world of Chinese AI
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China now has a word for token: ciyuan.
Key facts
- Anthropic, by contrast, raised $30 billion in a Series G round in February 2026, at a $380 billion post-money valuation, backed by a global consortium of deep-pocketed institutional investors
- Zhipu AI generated 724 million yuan ($104.8 million) in revenue, 132% higher than the year before, but its total losses ballooned to 4.7 billion yuan ($680 million), driven by R&D spending
- Unitree Robotics, perhaps China’s most prominent humanoid robot startup, has filed for a 4.2 billion yuan ($610 million) IPO on Shanghai’s STAR Market
- Alibaba spent 123 billion yuan ($17 billion) on capital expenditure in 2025, which helped contribute to a 66% plunge in net income
Summary
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 100 billion at the start of 2024. “We believe that China is the big winner in this tech war for several 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. The AI boom rescued China’s big tech companies from years of regulatory purgatory.