China Telecom and Unicom launch AI token subscription plans

China Telecom, along with the Shanghai branch of China Unicom, has launched AI packages based on token usage for both consumers and businesses. For individual users, plans begin at 9.9 yuan ($1.45) monthly for 10 million tokens, increasing to 49.9 yuan for 80 million tokens. Business offerings, which facilitate coding and the deployment of AI agents, are priced between 39.9 yuan and 299.9 yuan per month, with token allocations ranging from 15 million to 250 million. AI tokens serve as the fundamental units for AI models, where one token corresponds to roughly four characters or three-quarters of a word. Notably, one million tokens can cover the entire Harry Potter series, and in Chinese, a single character may count as two or three tokens, while processing a high-resolution image may require between 200 and over 1,000 tokens.