China names trillions of AI tokens after the yuan. Should the US worry for the dollar?

China has designated ci yuan as the translation for “token”, during an official’s speech on AI development that linked tech supply with commercial demand.

Photo: Reuters China has officially designated ciyuan as the translation for “token” – the computational units that power tools such as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini – a move widely seen as devising a new form of global currency for the age of artificial intelligence.

In Chinese, ci translates to “word”, while yuan is commonly used as a synonym for “currency”.

For instance, the basic unit of the Chinese renminbi is the yuan, and most foreign currencies are referred to as yuan in Chinese, prefixed by their respective country names.

While the US dollar has long been the bedrock of the global financial system, China seeks to gain a different kind of advantage in a “token economy” – where the key metrics are output per watt and cost per million tokens.

One such advantage stems from electricity, the essential raw material required to produce tokens.

China is the world’s largest electricity producer, and its power capacity has expanded at a rate that has repeatedly surpassed official targets.

On Monday, at the 2026 China Development Forum, Liu Liehong, administrator of the National Data Administration of China, used the term ciyuan as the official Chinese translation for “token” during a speech on AI development, effectively resolving a recent heated debate within China over how the term should be rendered.

In his address, Liu said the token, or ciyuan, was not only a value anchor for the intelligent era but also a “settlement unit” linking technological supply with commercial demand, thereby allowing business models to be quantified. “A new value system is rapidly taking shape around the invocation, distribution and settlement of tokens, and this is becoming a major pathway for monetising the AI industry,” he said.

While “token” originally belonged to the technology lexicon, its new official name carries strong economic overtones – particularly at a time when AI superstar Jensen Huang is also seriously contemplating its potential use as a form of compensation.

Just as electricity is measured in kilowatt-hours and the internet era was defined by data traffic, some mainland media outlets and online commentators believe that the Chinese name provides a benchmark for measuring the value chain of the AI industry – where they say China holds a competitive edge.

In the complex architecture of modern AI, a to

原文链接: 南华早报