China’s daily model-token consumption reached approximately 500 trillion in June 2026, nearly four times December 2025 levels.

The Large-Model Token Service Performance Monitoring Report (2026) was released on October 23 by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology’s AI institute, a Ministry of Industry and Information Technology laboratory focused on large-model and hardware/software evaluation, and the Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance. Reporting citing the study put China’s average daily token consumption at approximately 500 trillion in June 2026, nearly four times its December 2025 level.

The report describes rising token-service volumes alongside higher prices following two years of price competition. Its reported normalized domestic average price increased from RMB 6.8 in the second half of 2025 to RMB 13.46 in 2026, an increase of nearly double.

For representative overseas models released since the beginning of 2026, the report gives an average normalized price of approximately RMB 117.8. The supplied summary explains normalization as converting different pricing methods to a common basis, but does not specify the token quantity or complete billing denominator, so these figures should not be labeled as prices per million tokens.

The report was motivated by the increasing provision of model-as-a-service (MaaS) through public-cloud application programming interfaces (APIs) and users’ difficulty comparing service performance. The consumption figure measures token usage, not installed compute capacity, GPU utilization, or provider revenue.