For years, mobile carriers have billed users by the gigabyte. Now, China’s telecoms giants are seeking to monetise the artificial intelligence boom by introducing a new unit of measurement to monthly bills: the AI token.
On Sunday, China Telecom unveiled nationwide, token-based pricing packages aimed at a range of customers – from casual users to developers and businesses – according to information listed on the company’s app.
Consumer packages, tailored for everyday tasks, start at 9.9 yuan (US$1.45) per month for 10 million tokens and increase in price and volume to 49.9 yuan for 80 million tokens. Business packages, which support coding and AI agent deployment, range from 39.9 yuan to 299.9 yuan per month, with token allowances from 15 million to 250 million.
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AI tokens are the basic units of text, code or data that an AI model processes or generates. Just as streaming a video consumes megabytes, asking an AI chatbot to write an essay, debug code or generate an image consumes tokens.
One token is equal to about four characters, or roughly three-quarters of a word, while 1 million tokens is equal to the length of the entire Harry Potter book series. In languages like Chinese, a single character can be split into two or three tokens. Processing a high-resolution image might cost an AI model anywhere from 200 to over 1,000 tokens.
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China Telecom is bundling its token plans with its proprietary AI model, TeleChat, alongside popular third-party systems like Zhipu AI’s GLM-5 and DeepSeek-V3.2, with optional add-ons for enhanced network connectivity and cybersecurity.