China Galaxy Securities released a research report stating that tokens have become the value anchor in the intelligent era and are widely used as the settlement unit in the AI industry. From the demand side, the global token call volume is growing rapidly, driving the AI industry from model iteration to commercial implementation. This is expected to fundamentally reconstruct the production factors, industrial logic, and business models of the media industry. The token economy empowers traditional content production industries, and with the support of AIGC tools, it is advancing toward unlimited supply, promising to achieve prosperity in the content industry. It is recommended to focus on core AI industry beneficiaries. The main views of China Galaxy Securities are as follows:
Token: The Value Anchor in the Intelligent Era In March 2026, the China Development Forum officially designated the Chinese name for Token as "词元" (token), positioning it as the value anchor in the intelligent era and the unified settlement unit for both supply and demand sides of the industry. Currently, the daily domestic token call volume is showing an exponential upward trend, marking the transition of the domestic artificial intelligence industry from the model technology verification stage into the cycle of large-scale computing power consumption and commercial operation.
AIGC Drives Content Industrialization, Unlimited Supply Reshapes Industry Landscape As token consumption continues to grow rapidly, AI inference demand is being fully unleashed. The media content industry is accelerating its fundamental transition from traditional manual creation models to AI-native generation models. Content production has completely broken free from the constraints of human capacity, the bottlenecks of creative efficiency, and the limitations of high marginal costs, officially entering the stage of industrialized mass production characterized by scalability, standardization, and unlimited replication.
Continuous Technological Iteration of Large Models, Open-Source Ecology Promotes Ecosystem Development The continuous increase in token call volumes directly drives the explosive growth in API interface call demand across various downstream application ends. This layer of demand will further propagate upward to model base manufacturers. The sustained expansion of token demand not only amplifies the reuse value of model bases but also effectively reduces the unit costs of model training and technical operations and maintenance. This continuously strengthens the technical barriers and market competitive advantages of model base manufacturers, becoming the core driving force supporting the long-term growth of the model base industry.
Volume-Price Resonance in Cloud Services, Expected to Open New Growth Space The continuous increase in token consumption corresponds to the large-scale release of societal AI inference demand, constituting a definite positive for cloud service providers represented by Alibaba Cloud. As tokens become the unified value settlement unit in the intelligent era, the cloud computing business model is undergoing fundamental reconstruction. The industry is gradually moving away from the traditional IaaS model of server leasing and time-based billing, fully transitioning to a MaaS intelligent service billing system centered on token consumption. This promotes the expansion of high-margin AI service revenue for cloud providers, optimizes the overall profit structure, and ushers the industry into an upward cycle characterized by demand expansion and volume-price resonance.
Risk Warnings: Risks related to policy and regulatory environments, risks of AI technology development falling short of expectations, risks of AI application implementation falling short of expectations, and risks of short-term adjustments in market sentiment and capital flows.
Comments