According to media reports, the latest data released by OpenRouter, the world’s largest AI model API aggregation platform, shows that as of March 15, China’s AI large models reached 4.69 trillion tokens in weekly calls, surpassing the United States for the second consecutive week.
China’s models currently occupy the top three positions globally in token usage. JPMorgan forecasts that China’s AI inference token consumption will grow from about 10 quadrillion in 2025 to 3,900 quadrillion in 2030, representing a nearly 370-fold increase over five years.
In the AI ecosystem, a token is the smallest unit of information processed by a model—whether it’s a user query or a piece of generated code, everything must be broken down into tokens for computation.
Because of this, token call volume has become a key metric for measuring AI model activity and industrial value: the higher the usage, the greater the real-world value being created.
OpenRouter aggregates hundreds of large language models worldwide and serves over 5 million developer users, making its API call data a widely recognized barometer of global AI adoption trends. It directly reflects developers’ preferences and the true competitiveness of models in practical applications.
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