In April, Shantou in Guangdong province, completed China’s first city-level closed-loop verification for token exports, covering offshore data centers, token generation, overseas API requests and compliant cross-border data transmission. China’s ambition is straightforward: it wants to turn domestic electricity, data centers and large-language-models into a high-value export product. Under this model, electric power and servers stay inside China.
The models run inside Chinese intelligent computing centers. What crosses borders is the AI service itself: inference results delivered through an API. That makes “token exports” a new form of services trade. Traditional computing-power globalization often meant heavy investment abroad: building data centers, laying fiber, securing local energy supplies and operating networks in foreign markets. Token exports promise something different: electricity does not leave the grid, computing power does not leave the country, but value flows globally. Liu Xiaoge, Deputy Director of Research at the Development Strategy and Regional Economy Department of the Development Research Center, said: “Token exports have become the deep integration of artificial intelligence and digital trade in China. They have become a completely new form of digital services trade. At a time when China’s traditional trade faces geopolitical and tariff challenges, token exports, with their purely digital and zero-logistics delivery model, provide a new way to offset the risks of traditional trade frictions and drive growth in the services trade. They will reshape the position of China’s digital services in the global value chain,” Liu said.
The experiment also offers a glimpse of how China is trying to rewire its export economy for the AI age. For decades, the country’s growth was powered by factories, ports and container ships. The next phase may depend as much on offshore cable landing stations, green electricity, GPUs, compliance zones and APIs. For instance, Shantou’s international submarine cable landing station gives it a direct route into Southeast Asia. Shantou carries a large share of China’s international outbound bandwidth and provides a low-latency direct node to Singapore, making it one of the fastest Chinese gateways to the region. The city also sits near large offshore wind resources, giving its token-export story a green-energy narrative that matters to global clients under pressure to meet environmental, social and governance standards.
In the 2026 Government Work Report, Beijing called for new infrastructure projects involving large-scale smart computing clusters and the coordinated development of computing capacity and electricity supply. It also pledged integrated monitoring and distribution of computing capacity across the country and support for public cloud services. The logic is already visible in China’s northwestern regions. In Qingyang, Gansu province, white wind turbines turn and photovoltaic panels catch the sun. Instead of being pushed entirely through ultra-high-voltage lines to distant factories and cities, part of that green electricity can be consumed nearby by data centers. The current runs into racks of servers. GPUs turn electrons into matrix multiplication. The model produces tokens. A user thousands of miles away sees an edited image, a generated paragraph, a line of code or a customer-service answer.
From outside the China Energy Engineering Corp project area in Qingyang, data center buildings operated by Kingsoft Cloud, China Telecom and Chindata can be seen rising nearby. Qingyang has already built 11 data centers, created a domestic 10,000-card computing cluster and surpassed 140,000 petaflops of computing scale. In the old export economy, a city needed factories. In the token economy, it needs power, fiber, servers, regulation and an ability to guarantee low-latency service.
Now, Shantou and Qingyang do not need to become the next great AI model laboratories. They can become AI trade infrastructure: the service desk for computing power, the customs broker for tokens, and the bonded zone for cross-border data flows. Wang Peng, Researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, said: “Token exports are a concentrated expression of China’s combined competitive advantages in energy, data, infrastructure and engineering talent. In the context of a deeply reshaped global trade landscape, supporting token exports will help extend China’s trade competitiveness into intelligent computing power and has major, far-reaching significance for shaping new drivers of foreign trade,” he said. In early 2026, Chinese model token calls continued to increase with Chinese models overtaking U.S. rivals in token usage for the first time, the China Daily reports.
