(Yicai) Nov. 11 -- Lenovo Group has unveiled plans for a prototype hybrid token factory close to Beijing, as the world's largest personal computer maker seeks to monetize the processing capacity behind artificial intelligence through measurable, token-based inference services.

Under the plans announced yesterday, the plant will be built in Zhangjiakou, Hebei province. The initial phase will include a 15,000-petaflop heterogeneous computing cluster and a roughly 100-megawatt smart computing center, with annual token output exceeding two quadrillion. Its peak token output during initial operation will likely top 200 million tokens per second.

Unlike conventional data centers, which focus largely on rack count and computing scale, token factories track token output, generation speed, and comprehensive costs as operational metrics. The business model remains in the exploration stage.

Beijing-based Lenovo is exploring a new computing service model in which, instead of merely selling server cabinets and computing resources, it converts computing power into metered, deliverable token services, Senior Vice President Dai Wei told Yicai.

“Raw computing power does not inherently deliver real value,” said Dan, who is also general manager of Lenovo’s solutions and services group in China.

The core of the token factory business model is to orchestrate resources across different chips, AI models, and public and private clouds to cut idle computing capacity and unnecessary high-cost calls, noted Liu Jun, executive VP of Lenovo and president of Lenovo China.

Atoken factory is not simply a conventional data center operating under a different pricing or billing framework, Dai said, noting that the main commercial challenge is to reduce clients’ costs without undermining the operator's own profitability.

At this stage, it is rare for a single company to bear the construction and operating expenses of a hybrid token factory alone, he said. Beyond large enterprises, cloud providers, and telecom operators, industrial clusters may offer bigger growth potential for token plants, where the AI inference requirements of multiple businesses together would allow infrastructure to be used more intensively and efficiently, Dai added.

Blueprint for Future Expansion

The prototype factory in Zhangjiakou will have a dual purpose, he said. First, it will support Lenovo's own expanding need for AI applications. Second, it will provide a test environment in which the construction, operational processes, and cost-optimization framework can be validated, serving as a blueprint for replicating the model across other industrial regions, Dai stressed.

Lenovo plans to set up a token factory in Hunan province for film and television content production, aiming to cut production costs in half, shorten production cycles by 60 percent, and deliver more than 1,200 hours of content per month for local clients, he pointed out. In addition, it intends to develop additional use cases in other regions, tailoring them to local industrial strengths and covering smart manufacturing, education, and computing power export clients, he noted.

"The capital value of the token economy ultimately needs validation from two sets of books: one measuring client productivity gains and one tracking supplier profitability," Ying Ying, chief analyst covering the computer sector at Citic Securities, said to Yicai. “Only when both add up can the industry sustain growth, and corporate valuations gain solid underpinnings.”

About 180 kilometers northwest of China’s capital, Zhangjiakou is a key hub within the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei computing cluster under China's national East-to-West Computing Transfer project. It has drawn major players including Lenovo, Alibaba Group Holding, and Tencent Holdings, along with a host of data center operators. It has 55 operational computing centers with a total smart computing capacity of 318,000 P (16-bit floating-point).

Zhangjiakou is also a national renewable energy demonstration zone with abundant wind and solar power resources. Its installed renewable energy capacity surpasses 45 gigawatts, with annual power generation exceeding 70 billion kilowatt-hours.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev