Physix Frontier · News Briefing Card (enbrief · Oct 25, 2026)

CAICT: China's daily token use hits ~500 trillion in June

KEY FACTS

  • China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) says domestic daily token consumption reached about 500 trillion in June 2026.
  • That figure is nearly 4 times the consumption in December 2025.
  • CAICT jointly released the 2026 large model token service performance monitoring report.
  • The report's monitoring period runs from January to August 2026 and covers multiple platforms.
  • The report compares original-vendor platforms with four open-source models: DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, and Kimi.

KEY DATA

about 500 trillionJune domestic daily token consumption
78.23 tokens/sAugust domestic model average TPS
112.82 tokens/sAugust foreign typical model average TPS
13.46 yuan2026 domestic normalized average token price

PHYSIX OBSERVATION

Token consumption quadrupling in half a year shows large models have moved from early experimentation into scaled invocation, but prices have rebounded nearly twofold over the same period, meaning the low-price dividend era is essentially over. Throughput still lags foreign models, and latency is still rising. Users selecting models cannot look only at official platforms; third-party optimization differences may determine the actual experience.

Source: enbrief original report ↗