By NUPIAO Editorial Team
The dust has finally settled on MWC Shanghai this year. But if you walked into the expo expecting the usual buzzwords like “5G commercialization” or “network coverage,” you’d be looking at yesterday’s news.
That old vocabulary was completely overshadowed by a single, buzz-worthy term: Token. It feels like the entire communication industry is undergoing a fundamental currency swap—moving from measuring value in bits to measuring it in Tokens.
For over two decades, the “Big Three” telecom operators have played the same game: connection. They made money from voice calls, data流量 (data traffic), and broadband fees. But let’s be honest, that business model is showing its age in the 5G era.
The numbers tell a sobering story. In 2025, while the Big Three still raked in a staggering 1.97 trillion yuan in revenue, growth was practically flat (+0.1%), and net profit actually dipped by 2.3%, snapping a 12-year streak of gains. By Q1 2026, the pain was even more acute, with net profits dropping between 4% and 18%. Traditional revenue streams like voice, SMS, and basic data were all shrinking.
But here’s the twist: while the old stuff is bleeding, the new stuff is exploding. China Telecom’s smart business revenue jumped 38.2%. China Mobile’s computing power services grew by over 11% (with AI computing services skyrocketing 279%). China Unicom saw its AI-related revenue surge past 140%.
The demand side is shifting just as dramatically. According to the National Data Administration, by March 2026, daily Token calls in China hit over 140 trillion—a number that was only in the billions back in early 2024. That’s a thousand-fold increase in just two years! OpenRouter confirmed this trend, noting that Chinese models have led global Token usage for six consecutive weeks as of June 2026.
So, what does a successful Token economy look like? It’s a three-step recipe:
- Production: You need computing power (the “factories”).
- Distribution: You need networks to deliver these Tokens to users.
- Consumption: You need real-world scenarios where people are willing to pay.
On the hardware front, vendors aren’t just stacking GPUs anymore; they’re asking, “How many Tokens can one card produce?” This is why “Super Nodes” are the hot topic. Take Huawei, for instance, which launched the Atlas 950 SuperPoD—the country’s only liquid-cooled super-node supporting 8,192 NPUs. ZTE took a different angle, opting for “software-hardware decoupling” to allow flexible GPU compatibility rather than locking customers into massive, upfront investments.
Vendors are essentially bundling computing power and network access to sell to operators, who are the biggest infrastructure buyers in China. But operators aren’t just buying toys; they need to see actual revenue growth to justify the spend.
Yang Yang, President of Huawei’s Carrier Business Group, put it best: Operators possess a unique advantage for the “Bits + Tokens” future.
Why? Because they already control over 1.8 billion mobile users and millions of enterprise clients. They know how to design packages, bill customers, and manage service at scale. They can treat Tokens exactly like data—packaging them, pricing them, and selling them. Plus, they own the backbone networks, edge nodes, and massive computing resources needed to schedule compute across different regions and architectures.
In short, operators aren’t just pipes for data anymore. They are becoming the central hub connecting computing power, AI models, applications, and end-users in the intelligent economy.
And they are moving fast. Just last month, China Telecom rolled out nationwide trial Token packages starting at 9.9 CNY for 10 million Tokens. Around the same time, Shanghai Mobile offered a “1 CNY for 400,000 Tokens” deal payable via phone bills. The framework for this new business model is taking shape before our eyes.
On the connectivity side, the focus is on 5G-A and U6GHz frequencies—technologies seen as the bridge to 6G and the perfect fit for mobile AI. At MWC, both Huawei and ZTE unveiled impressive 256TR solutions. Even Qualcomm’s CFO, Akash Palkhiwala, predicted that 6G will be the first “native AI network,” with AI accounting for roughly 30% of global traffic growth.
However, the real bottleneck remains the application layer—the area where operators have historically been weakest. This year, the Big Three are aggressively launching AI assistants for individuals, families, and businesses. It’s all about finding a place for those Tokens to live. That’s why device makers like Honor, vivo, and ZTE are so active; they’re redefining the terminal OS (like Honor’s Agentic OS) to make devices intent-driven and naturally interactive.
Yet, despite the hype, some reality checks are necessary. Current pricing models, like 9.9 CNY for 10 million Tokens, barely cover the cost of computing. Liu Liehong, Director of the National Data Administration, warned that we can’t simply copy the “low-price, subsidy-heavy” tactics of the data era when Tokens become the standard unit.
There’s also a dependency issue. Many current Token packages rely on third-party models from companies like DeepSeek or Zhipu. Since the actual Token consumption happens at the model level, operators risk losing control over pricing and metering if they don’t master core model capabilities. This is likely why operators are pushing to lead a new operational model rather than just acting as sales channels for model providers.
MWC Shanghai has always been a barometer for China’s tech industry. This year, Tokens moved from being a technical jargon inside LLM labs to a line item on your phone bill. The transition from selling data to selling Tokens presents huge opportunities but also steep challenges. Whether this transformation succeeds for operators will largely determine if equipment vendors can achieve their next wave of explosive growth.
Ultimately, the verdict is up to the user.
