Preface:

The artificial intelligence (AI) industry is entering a new era, where computing power has emerged as a core resource, and electricity has become the fundamental constraint underpinning this computing capability.

As large-scale AI models expand rapidly and inference demands surge, a previously overlooked yet increasingly critical reality has come to light: the true foundation of the AI industry chain rests on the energy system.

The Hidden Constraint of AI: Electricity as the Backbone of Computing Power

A seldom-noticed reality in the AI sector is that the growth rate of computing power far outpaces the energy system’s ability to adapt.

With the rise of generative AI, data centers have become one of the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand.

Simultaneously, the inference requirements of AI models are driving up computing power consumption even further.

For decades, industrial manufacturing was the primary driver of electricity demand growth. However, in the AI era, data centers are evolving into new high-energy-consuming nodes.

In essence, competition in the AI industry is fundamentally a race for computing power resources—resources whose upper limits are dictated by the energy system.

As a result, nations are re-evaluating the energy structure of data centers and exploring more efficient models for allocating computing power and electricity.

Token-Based Global Expansion: A High-Speed Pathway for China’s Computing Power Globalization

A developer in San Francisco submits an API request. The data travels via undersea cables to a data center in western China. Electricity from the local grid powers GPU chips, which perform the inference calculations. The results are then sent back to the United States through the same cables.

In the deserts of western China, green electricity priced at 0.5 yuan per kWh is converted into Tokens within local data centers. When sold to global developers, its value can multiply to 11 yuan.

This value leap is unattainable through traditional electricity or industrial product exports.

Global developers are voting with their wallets, driven by unbeatable cost advantages.

The output price of mainstream AI models in the United States is $10 per million Tokens, while Chinese models are priced between 10 and 20 yuan. Even after accounting for exchange rates, the price difference is nearly sevenfold.

For processing the same volume of Tokens, MiniMax's M2.5 and Zhipu's GLM-5 have input costs of just $0.3 per million Tokens, whereas their overseas counterpart, Claude Opus 4.6, costs $5 per million Tokens—about 16.7 times higher than Chinese models.

The wildly popular open-source AI agent OpenClaw takes this cost-effectiveness advantage to the extreme.

Its core capability is dynamic model routing. Upon receiving a task, it evaluates the task across 15 dimensions in real time, automatically selecting the cheapest, lowest-latency, and most suitable model.

The result is a steady flow of global developer requests to computing data centers in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hangzhou through this intelligent "router."

As global daily Token invocation volumes approach the quadrillions, Huatai Securities estimates that this could drive China’s electricity consumption and power demand up by more than 10%.

Token-based global expansion has evolved from an industry trend into a long-term growth track capable of substantially boosting China’s energy sector.

With globally leading computing power production capacity, China’s computing power industry faces the core challenge of transforming this capacity into global market competitiveness, tangible revenue, and influence.

Its core value lies in addressing three major pain points in traditional computing power globalization, thereby creating an efficient, trustworthy, and low-cost circulation pathway for China’s computing power on the global stage.

Traditional computing power globalization has long been hindered by industry bottlenecks: high trust barriers, inefficient cross-border settlements, and a lack of standardization.

Compliant computing power tokenization precisely addresses these three challenges.

According to IDC’s 2025 Global Computing Power Trading Market Report, the global cross-border computing power trading market reached $278 billion in 2025, a 68% year-on-year increase. Computing power transactions based on trustworthy digital credentials accounted for over 30% of this total, with growth far outpacing traditional trading models.

China’s power system is indirectly supporting global AI applications. From this perspective, Token-based global expansion is not merely software trade but also an invisible export of energy and computing power infrastructure.

Computing-Electricity Synergy: The Cornerstone of China’s Digital Economy

When discussing China’s global competitiveness in computing power, initial reactions often focus on server production capacity and data center construction scale, while overlooking the most critical support: China’s unique power system advantages and the systemic benefits of computing-electricity synergy.

According to the 2025 National Electric Power Industry Statistics released by the National Energy Administration in January 2026, China’s total installed power generation capacity reached 3.32 billion kW by the end of 2025.

Non-fossil fuel power generation capacity accounted for 1.83 billion kW, or 55.1% of the total, ranking first globally in scale.

China’s computing-electricity synergy has long moved beyond the basic stage of [building data centers next to power plants] and entered a phase of deep coupling between the power system and computing power network across the entire value chain.

① Green power consumption and load synergy on the supply side: In western regions rich in renewable energy, such as Inner Mongolia, Gansu, and Ningxia, the [new energy + energy storage + data center] model enables local consumption of green power.

This not only reduces curtailment rates of wind and solar power but also directly converts the low-cost advantage of renewable energy into a cost advantage for computing power.

② Dual-cycle synergy between power flow and data flow on the network side: Ultra-high-voltage power grids ensure stable power supply to western computing hubs, while the computing power network breaks geographical boundaries, allowing low-cost computing power from the west to seamlessly serve digital economy demands in the east.

In 2026, computing-electricity synergy was included in the government work report, and China has established a comprehensive policy support system.

It explicitly requires that newly built data centers in national hub nodes have a green power ratio of no less than 80%, effectively locking in the cost advantage of green power within the institutional framework.

The potential of Token-based global expansion depends on how deeply computing-electricity synergy can be implemented.

It is not a simple superposition of computing power and electricity but a deep integration of the two throughout planning, construction, and operation.

Computing-electricity synergy offers a novel solution: building data centers directly in western energy-rich regions, converting otherwise difficult-to-transmit green power into computing power on-site, packaging it into Tokens, and delivering it globally via a single network cable.

This not only creates new rigid consumption scenarios for western wind and solar resources but also multiplies the value of electricity—which previously generated only a few cents of GDP per kWh—by tens of times.

More importantly, computing-electricity synergy constructs a self-reinforcing positive industrial cycle.

The more Tokens are sold, the more China’s renewable energy industry benefits. As installed capacity for wind and solar continues to expand and the cost per kWh continues to decline, the price advantage of Tokens becomes more prominent, and global market share increases.

Rising global market share, in turn, drives greater demand for Tokens, further stimulating green power consumption and growth in the power industry.

Green Power Direct Connection: The Core Lever for Implementing Computing-Electricity Synergy

The green power direct connection model enables computing centers to connect directly with nearby photovoltaic power stations, wind farms, and energy storage facilities, achieving point-to-point supply of green power.

This reduces AC-DC conversion losses during power grid upload and download while significantly lowering energy costs for computing centers.

As of February 2026, 84 green power direct connection projects have been approved nationwide, with a total new energy installed capacity of 32.59 million kW. Applications cover various scenarios, including power supply for computing centers and zero-carbon parks.

The industry is also exploring more efficient DC direct supply (DC/DC) models to further reduce conversion losses and enhance energy efficiency. In this field, China is leading globally.

Inner Mongolia, leveraging its national leadership in renewable energy installed capacity, has built the [China Cloud Valley] as a large-scale demonstration base for computing-electricity integration, with its intelligent computing scale ranking first nationwide.

Ningxia has completed the country’s first large-scale computing-electricity integration project, creating the [Western Digital Valley] industrial cluster.

Shanghai has innovated a cross-provincial computing power transfer and peak-shaving model, enabling 3-minute cross-thousand-kilometer computing power migration. This makes computing power a grid-regulatable resource, effectively assisting grid peak shaving and valley filling.

The implementation of these pilot projects validates the feasibility of computing-electricity synergy and establishes replicable and scalable development models.

Conclusion:

Computing-electricity synergy is the core barrier on the production side, providing Token-based global expansion with an irreplaceable product supply.

Token-based global expansion is the core channel on the circulation side, opening up growth space in the global market for computing-electricity synergy.

Revenue from the global market can further drive technological upgrades and scale expansion of China’s domestic computing-electricity synergy system, forming a positive cycle of [capacity expansion - global monetization - technological upgrading - even larger capacity expansion].

Partial References:
• New Energy Industry Observer: [From Transformer Scramble to Token Global Expansion: How China’s New Energy is Covertly Dominating the AI Era]
• China Electric Power News: [Computing-Electricity Synergy: China’s [First Move], How Will It Play Out?]
• New Energy Industry Circle: [15th Five-Year Plan AI Core Signals: Computing-Electricity Synergy Opens a New Track for Computing Power and Electricity Integration]
• Jintou Research: [Token Global Expansion: How Can China’s Electricity Be Sold Worldwide?]
• People’s Posts and Telecommunications News: [[Computing-Electricity Synergy]: How to Achieve Synergy?]