Insert token: how China’s surging AI use is turning compute into currency

Insert token: how China’s surging AI use is turning compute into currency

Every month, a Beijing-based ByteDance employee says he burns through close to a billion units of a new corporate currency – one that cannot buy a coffee or pay rent. Yet, as he noted, that staggering volume “doesn’t even put me near the top of the consumption rankings in my department”. That currency is not yuan, but artificial intelligence tokens. “Using AI has become part of almost every task now,” said the employee, who requested anonymity a…