China’s electricity cannot cross its borders, but Chinese tokens are already sold globally. These two phenomena are essentially the same thing. Tokens are China’s true electricity export. I know this concept may not have fully clicked yet, but every sentence I share is backed by data.
China generates 10 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, surpassing the EU, Russia, India, and Japan combined. This is not because China lacks the desire to sell. It is physically impossible. Electricity cannot be stored or loaded onto ships. Extending high-voltage transmission lines across national borders involves negotiations that can drag on for a decade. It is like holding the world’s largest gold mine where the gold is too heavy to transport, leaving it piled up in your own backyard.
Tokens have shattered this bottleneck.
First, let us clarify what a token represents. When you converse with an AI like DeepSeek, every character and line of code it returns consists of tokens. On the surface, they appear as text or dialogue. Fundamentally, they are digitally encapsulated electrical energy. If you doubt this, consider the math. In the cost structure of AI inference, electricity plus compute depreciation together account for a staggering 80% to 90%. In other words, nearly 90 cents of every dollar spent on a token effectively pays for electricity.
A token is a compressed packet of electrical energy, representing the final product refined from China’s northwestern green electricity through GPU computation.
So how does this relate to exports? When a Silicon Valley developer sits at their computer and calls a Chinese large language model API, data instantly traverses undersea fiber-optic cables to reach computing centers in Ningxia or Inner Mongolia. Thousands of GPUs roar to life, consuming China’s cheapest northwestern green power to perform logical inference. They return the result to a screen in San Francisco within seconds. Throughout this entire process, not a drop of oil was burned, and not a single power cable crossed a border. The value of Chinese electricity has already been delivered across borders via tokens. This is dimensional warfare involving zero physical output, light-speed cross-border transfer, and near-zero loss.
The most powerful insight is yet to come. Why is China uniquely positioned to execute this? The answer lies in two words. Electricity prices.
China is uniquely positioned to lead in the AI race because it has solved the “physical” constraint of intelligence: electricity prices. While algorithms are digital, running them requires massive amounts of power, and China’s ability to provide this power at a fraction of the cost in the West is becoming a decisive competitive edge.
Electricity for data centres in China can be as low as 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, roughly one-third the price in the U.S.. Unlike the U.S., where regional grids often operate with thin reserve margins, China maintains a deliberate surplus of electricity. This allows them to “soak up” the massive power demands of AI without destabilising the grid.
The State Grid Corporation of China plans to invest approximately 4 trillion RMB (US$579 billion) between 2026 and 2030 to further upgrade the power grid, specifically to support the future “intelligent economy”. Local governments often provide electricity subsidies for data centres, sometimes cutting power bills by up to 50% if they use domestic chips, further offsetting other costs.
In northwestern China, the situation is different. In specialized wind and solar power zones in Zhongwei, Ningxia, or Qingyang, Gansu, electricity prices can drop as low as 0.20 RMB (0.029 USD) per kilowatt-hour. This represents the absolute global price trough. The per-token cost gap between China and the U.S. can be seen from here.
Now you understand why DeepSeek API pricing can be nearly 20 to 30 times cheaper than OpenAI. This is not due to subsidies. This is not dumping. This is northwestern green electricity pushing cost advantages to their absolute limit within large language models.
Even more ingenious is the export mechanism for tokens. When you export electric vehicles, you face tariffs, trade barriers, and customs inspections at ports. Tokens travel via fiber optics. Under current WTO rules, electronic transmissions are temporarily exempt from tariffs. There are no containers, no cargo ships, and no customs declarations. Chinese electricity, cloaked in data, walks boldly into every terminal device worldwide. This is, without question, the strongest strategic backdoor available for China’s energy strategy.
Now consider another set of data that may surprise you. Recent statistics show that 4 out of the top 5 models on OpenRouter are Chinese large models, including MiniMax’s M2.5, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5, Zhipu’s GLM-5, and DeepSeek’s V3.2. Their combined consumption reaches 85.7%. Chinese AI models have evolved from followers to price setters. This is only the beginning.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has long predicted that the inflection point for the AI Agent era has arrived. In the future, a single AI completing a task may consume 10 to 50 times as many tokens as it does today. Institutional forecasts project that by 2030, China’s AI inference token consumption will grow from 100 trillion in 2025 to 390,000 trillion by 2030. The ceiling for demand is not even visible yet.
So what is the essence of this transformation? Throughout human history, every reconstruction of the great-power order has begun with a revolution in the form of energy. The British Empire rose on coal and steam. The United States rose on oil and internal combustion. Today, China is quietly rewriting the rules through the ultimate coupling of electricity and computing.
Those northwestern green power resources that once had to be curtailed, causing heartache due to the inability to absorb them, are now being repriced and redeployed as tokens. Previously, we exchanged sweat for foreign exchange. Now, we exchange algorithms for foreign exchange. This is not overtaking on a curve. This is switching to an entirely new track.
Have you noticed? The changes that truly reshape the world often do not happen in headlines. They happen when an ordinary person opens a chat window on their phone, types a line of text, and waits for a reply. Behind that moment lies the wind of Inner Mongolia, the hydropower of Sichuan, and the sunlight of Xinjiang. They travel thousands of kilometers, burn inside GPUs, transform into tokens, cross the Pacific, and land on their screen.
What we are exporting is not merely data. It is the confidence of a civilization.
After reading this, do you believe token exports represent the smartest strategic move in China’s energy history? Pay attention. This is just the beginning.
Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.
Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.
An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.
