China's AI boom

China’s artificial intelligence market is shifting from model demos to paid use, with Chinese firms racing into public markets and selling software by the token. (fortune.com) A token is the unit an artificial intelligence model counts when it reads or writes text, and Chinese companies are increasingly charging customers on that basis. South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported token usage in China rose more than 40% in three months, while Fortune said Beijing has now adopted a standard Chinese term for the concept. (biz.chosun.com) (fortune.com) That pricing model is showing up alongside a burst of listings in Hong Kong. KPMG said Hong Kong raised HK$109.9 billion from 40 initial public offerings in the first quarter of 2026, up 489% from a year earlier, and nearly 80% of proceeds came from A-plus-H and specialist technology listings. (kpmg.com) One of the biggest debuts came from Shanghai Biren Technology, an artificial intelligence chip designer. Reuters, via Yahoo Finance, reported Biren raised HK$5.58 billion and its shares surged nearly 120% by midday on its first trading day in January 2026. (finance.yahoo.com) The push is not just about chips or chatbots. China’s 2026 government work report called for “large-scale commercial application of AI” in key sectors and for new “hyper-scale intelligent computing clusters,” as officials said the country’s core artificial intelligence industry reached more than 1.2 trillion yuan in 2025. (english.www.gov.cn) Officials are also leaning hard into open-source models, which publish their weights or code so other developers can adapt them. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said Chinese open-source large models ranked first globally in downloads, a point repeated by state media in early April. (english.cctv.com) (english.www.gov.cn) That helps explain the current craze around “agents,” which are tools that do tasks for users instead of only answering prompts. Xinhua reported on April 3 that MiniMax had nearly 200 engineers tuning models in Shanghai, while OpenRouter data placed a new MiniMax release among the world’s top 10 models by token calls, alongside DeepSeek and Zhipu AI. (english.news.cn) The United States is still trying to slow China’s access to top-end hardware. The Bureau of Industry and Security tightened advanced semiconductor restrictions in October 2023 and then expanded controls in a January 15, 2025 rule that also added limits on some artificial intelligence model weights. (bis.gov) (federalregister.gov) Washington has since adjusted some licensing terms without ending the broader pressure campaign. Law firm summaries of a December 8, 2025 Commerce rule said the United States moved some exports of certain advanced computing commodities to case-by-case review for China and Macau, while keeping the wider export-control framework in place. (cov.com) (bakermckenzie.com) The result is a competition centered less on who has the single best chip and more on who can turn cheaper models into products that businesses will actually buy. In China right now, that means public listings, open-source software, and a billing unit small enough to count every word. (fortune.com)