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Chinese banks, telecom carriers and a Guangzhou district have started packaging AI tokens as credit card rewards, monthly plans and a basis for business lending. Research across 25 European languages finds tokeniser fertility ranges from 1.23 tokens per word in English to about 3.1 in Greek and Maltese.
Banks, telecom carriers and a district government in China have begun selling AI tokens as consumer products. Moonshot’s Kimi and Agricultural Bank of China have launched what Kimi’s own campaign page calls an AI-native credit card.
It is available only in mainland China, with gift campaigns running to 30 September. First-time applicants who spend 5,888 yuan within three months get a co-branded plush charm and two months of premium membership, limited to 1,000 people.
Moonshot is the company TNW last reported chasing a $50bn valuation ahead of a Hong Kong listing.
China Telecom started trial token packages on 17 May, sold in three tiers to developers, small businesses and households.
Individual customers get the carrier’s Xingchen model and DeepSeek V3.2, according to its own announcement, while developers also get GLM5. Industry reporting puts the consumer entry tier at 9.9 yuan a month for 10 million tokens.
The carrier plans a Tianyi Token so loyalty points can be redeemed for token packages, managed through an operations platform it calls TokenHub.
The Haizhu district of Guangzhou went furthest. It released a Token Loan in August, alongside eight supporting measures.
Rather than judging young AI companies on plant and equipment, banks bring token consumption, platform qualifications and payment-collection progress into credit review. Bank of China’s Guangzhou branch can set a limit from a contract or a company’s token use.
A token is a strange unit to price by. Across 25 European languages, tokeniser fertility runs from 1.23 tokens per word in English to roughly 3.1 in Greek and Maltese.
Romance languages sit between 1.5 and 1.7, Germanic between 1.7 and 1.9, Slavic between 2.2 and 2.5, and Uralic and Baltic languages between 2.7 and 3.0.
So the same bundle buys about two and a half times less in Athens than in Dublin. A monthly token plan sold across the EU would deliver different amounts of service depending on the language it was used in.
The other contrast is where public money goes. Haizhu offers up to 2 million yuan a year toward companies’ token bills, and up to 1.5 million for improving token output per chip.
Europe has put roughly EUR 30B behind AI gigafactories, of which only about EUR 1B of Brussels’ share is committed. One jurisdiction is paying to build the compute, the other is paying people to use it.
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