China's daily AI token usage tops 500T as compute demand grows

China’s daily AI token call volume exceeded 500 trillion as of June 2026, as large-model applications expanded across industries. The figure measures aggregate model processing activity rather than the number of users or models. Industry representatives said model update cycles have shortened from roughly three months to four to six weeks. Agent workflows also repeatedly retrieve information, read context, call tools and process feedback, increasing demand for inference computing. Tencent said Hunyuan 3 recorded 68 times more token calls than Hunyuan 2 in its first week. [IT Home, in Chinese]