(Yicai) Nov. 3 -- Li Jiaqi, a popular Chinese livestreamer known for selling lipsticks, sold 100,000 personal monthly membership cards, equivalent to about two trillion tokens, within half an hour after Alibaba Group Holding's artificial intelligence office service QwenWork entered his livestreaming studio.

Li sold around 20 trillion tokens through QwenWork basic monthly membership cards priced at 1 Chinese cent (0.2 US cents) apiece, discounted from CNY28 (USD4.20), during a livestream late on Nov. 2. Chen Yusen, vice president of Alibaba and chief executive officer of Qwen Office, took part in the event to showcase the use of AI in office scenarios.

This was the first time AI computing products were sold in a top livestreamer's studio, highlighting the expansion of large language model services from technological applications to the consumer market.

The intent behind Li selling tokens may matter more than how many tokens are sold, said Zhang Yi, CEO and chief analyst of iiMedia Research. It served more as an enlightenment movement in the consumer-end market under the token economy, pushing AI commercialization and the business-end technology narrative into the context of mass consumption, he pointed out.

Tokens are the smallest unit of measurement for large models to process and generate information. Both user input and model output consume tokens, so they are used for AI model services and computing resource billing.

In addition, tokens debuted on some e-commerce platforms as a new category in this year's Double 11, China's annual online shopping festival. Alibaba's Tmall launched the AI Space Station Token Recharge Center on Sept. 3, with Qwen, Z.AI, MiniMax, DeepSeek, and Kimi opening services on the center, while JD.Com launched an AI software recharge center, drawing AI models and agents such as Z.AI's GLM, DeepSeek, Doubao, and Tencent Cloud.

Weekly token usage by the world's top AI models on application programming interface aggregation platform OpenRouter surged to 194 trillion at the end of last month from 6.4 trillion early this year. Chinese AI models have led US rivals in weekly token call volume for 27 consecutive weeks.

Computing power leasing is shifting from resource-based to token commissions, Shanxi Securities reported. Chinese corporate AI agents' annual token consumption is expected to surge more than 30 times per year over the next five years.

Under the neutral hypothesis, the token commission revenue of computing power leasing companies will likely top CNY59.2 billion (USD8.9 billion) in 2028, Shanxi Securities said, citing International Data Corporation.

Editor: Martin Kadiev