NextFin News — Token consumption has emerged as a key metric of artificial-intelligence scale and activity in the half-year reports of listed Chinese banks, reflecting the shift of large models from pilots to high-frequency production use.
Data disclosed by Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Merchants Bank, Ping An Bank and others show AI applications expanding across the full banking value chain. ICBC’s daily token consumption reached the hundred-billion level by early 2026, up nearly 100-fold from two years earlier. China Merchants Bank reported daily consumption of 33 billion tokens as of the end of May.
The surge tracks deeper embedding of large models in customer service, risk control, marketing, operations and other scenarios. Banks say the move from experimental trials to routine production workloads is driving the rapid rise in token volumes.
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