China's AI patent growth surpasses 3,400 in 2025, doubling previous year's rate

At the 2026 China International Big Data Industry Expo, Hu Jianbo, director of the National Data Development Research Institute, highlighted the rapid growth of smart agent applications and related services. In 2025, China's smart agent patent grants exceeded 3,400, marking a doubling of the previous year's growth rate. IT Home reported that by June 2026, China's intelligent computing capacity reached 2.4 million PFLOPS, a 50.9% increase over six months. The eight major hub nodes accounted for nearly 90% of the country's total intelligent computing resources. The data industry in China reached 6.78 trillion yuan in 2025, up 15.7% year-on-year. AI-driven software and data resource products contributed 4.99 trillion yuan, or 73.6% of the total. Word tokens are increasingly becoming a standard unit for measuring, settling, and statistics in AI services. By March 2026, the country's daily average word token usage exceeded 140 trillion, equivalent to processing the entire collection of the National Library of China 250 times in a single day. Daily usage grew from 100 billion in early 2024 to 100 trillion by year-end 2025, and now stands at 140 trillion, a more than 1,000-fold increase in two years.