Surging artificial intelligence data usage reshaping economy

China’s artificial intelligence (AI) data usage has experienced exponential growth, soaring from 1 trillion to 140 trillion tokens per day by March this year, reflecting a significant shift in the economy.
AI data generation overtook IoT sensing data in 2025, with AI and system software accounting for 26.92 zettabytes out of 52.26 zettabytes of total generated data.
The concept of the “token economy” is emerging, where computing activity becomes measurable, tradable, and central to economic output.
In 2025, inference data used for AI model deployment surpassed training data for the first time, indicating a move toward large-scale commercialization of AI.
The rapid increase in token usage could impact AI service pricing models and global competition for data resources.
Companies like Fujian-based Joyful Embodied are developing robotic data collection facilities to gather high-precision industrial data to train embedded AI systems, emphasizing data’s vital role in next-generation AI, especially in robotics.
Joyful Embodied aims to achieve up to 95 percent efficiency in data collection and is expanding its operations overseas to Southeast Asian markets.