(Yicai) Aug. 20 -- The Lingang Special Area, a testing ground for economic and trade policies within the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, aims to become a globally influential hub for the export of tokens -- the basic units of data processed by artificial intelligence models -- as they emerge as a key part of China's digital trade.

Lingang’s ambition is not to serve as a computing power production base nor a physical transmission corridor, Chen Huangchao, deputy head of data at the area’s administrator, said at an AI industry event on overseas expansion yesterday. Rather, it seeks to position itself as the central operating center linking AI output with global demand, as well as a hub for compliance, payments, certification, regulatory coordination, and high-end services, Chen added.

Token export is a digital service that converts electricity into computing power and then into tokens before delivering those tokens efficiently and compliantly to global users through seabed cables. With Chinese large language models rapidly gaining international market share on the back of their competitive pricing and performance, token exports are becoming another way to export value from China's digital economy.

Lingang aims to have overseas demand routed into the area, where model inference and service processing are completed locally before the generated results are sent back to international users via undersea fiber-optic cables, Chen noted, adding that payment takes place in China, keeping tax revenues within the country.

Companies in Lingang have already received a variety of token export projects, Chen said. These include requests from Cambodia to process local Angkor cultural data for delivery to global gaming and film studios, from Southeast Asia for AI agent-powered educational services, and from Europe and the United States for AI services that support smart hardware, Chen pointed out.

Lingang has four key advantages underpinning its ambition as a token exports hub, Chen said. The area has a broad range of token application scenarios spanning digital culture, autonomous vehicles, and consumer electronics; a comprehensive infrastructure base; ongoing efforts to develop mutual recognition systems for international data governance rules; and a comprehensive package of policy support for such services, according to Chen.

Lingang's infrastructure includes compliant global data links, international data centers physically isolated from the domestic internet but connected to the global data environment, eight major computing power centers with a total capacity of 108 EFLOPS, and high-speed international dedicated lines to Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore, with latency of as low as 23 milliseconds, Chen pointed out.

To achieve its goal, the area will create a one-stop compliance service platform, which will provide companies with a suite of services, including assistance with checking data security, drawing up standardized contracts, checking cross-border rules, and adapting compliance processes for different jurisdictions, Chen said.

Lingang also plans to deploy technologies such as privacy-enhancing computation, blockchain,  and regulatory sandboxes, to shift corporate compliance processes from "manual review" to "real-time monitoring, dynamic filing, and full-chain traceability," Chen noted. It will also promote the mutual recognition of international rules on a larger scale, encouraging more overseas customers to confidently use Chinese token services, Chen added.

In addition, Lingang will build a more comprehensive industrial ecosystem for overseas AI expansion by attracting a wide range of participants, including computing power providers, model developers, cloud service providers, corpus processors, data merchants, cross-border payment and settlement service providers, liability insurers, and legal service providers for overseas rights protection, Chen pointed out.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev