Token Photo: VCG

Approaching.ai, a Beijing-based high-efficiency artificial intelligence (AI) token production service provider, said on Tuesday that it has completed its series A financing round, bringing its total fundraising to more than 1 billion yuan ($147.5 million) within six months, according to a note sent to the Global Times. 

The new capital will be used to expand high-quality AI token production capacity, upgrade the company's self-developed ATaaS platform — short for Approaching.ai Token as a Service — and further integrate domestic heterogeneous computing power into core production scenarios, the company said.

The latest funding round comes as investors and industry players increasingly focus on the rapidly expanding AI inference market and the rising demand for high-quality token production — the underlying computing output used by large-language models and other AI systems, according to experts. 

Tian Feng, former dean of SenseTime's Intelligence Industry Research Institute, told the Global Times on Tuesday that the participation of industry investors reflects growing confidence in the long-term value of AI token factories, while also signaling stronger market interest in scalable, high-quality token production capabilities. 

"We believe that high-quality AI token services have become a core necessity for enterprises as large AI models move deeply into production systems," Approaching.ai's CEO Ai Zhiyuan said. 

"Through close collaboration with industry investors, we will accelerate the large-scale commercialization of domestic heterogeneous computing solutions and help Chinese chips achieve large-scale, routine deployment in high-standard AI production environments," Ai added.

A token is the basic unit used by AI models to process text, images and speech. Every prompt and response consumes tokens, making them both a billing unit and a measure of computational resource consumption in AI services. 

Token factories have recently received a lot of attention, and one important reason is that the AI industry is rapidly transitioning from the "chatbot era" to the "intelligent agent era," Tian noted. This shift has caused explosive growth in token consumption.

Approaching.ai said that since the beginning of 2026, its average token production efficiency per computing unit has more than tripled while total high-quality token capacity has increased more than 30 times. 

The company's fundraising comes amid a broader surge in token-related business. 

Alibaba Cloud said its token revenue has grown more than 15 times since the start of 2026, while ByteDance's Doubao model surpassed 180 trillion token calls per day in June, the Singapore-based Business Times reported.

China's token economy has also become a key topic in the sector. The 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which will be held in Shanghai from July 17-20, is expected to feature the token economy as one of its central topics, Tian said.

As competition over computing intensifies, several telecom operators are moving into token-based services. China Telecom has launched token pricing packages for users ranging from casual consumers to developers and enterprises, offering consumers monthly AI usage packages starting at 9.9 yuan for 10 million tokens, according to information on its website. China Unicom's Shanghai branch is also offering token packages to customers, according to a company press release.

According to the National Data Administration (NDA), China recorded more than 140 trillion token calls per day as of March, up 1,000-fold from the beginning of 2024. 

"The massive increase in daily token calls demonstrates that China's AI development has entered a phase of rapid growth," said Liu Liehong, NDA head. "From conversational AI to decision-making intelligent agents, China's AI industry competitiveness has significantly strengthened," the Xinhua News Agency reported. 

The core factor driving the explosion of AI tokens is the overall expansion of inference demand. This also confirms the judgment of investors that AI inference will become one of the largest markets in the world, said Tian.

When the token becomes the "water, electricity and coal" of the AI era, a hidden and high-growth underlying business is emerging — the "AI token factory," Tian said, adding that China's low-cost green power, mature computing infrastructure and large-scale application scenarios could help position the country as a major "token factory" in the global AI economy.