High demand for tokens: The cloud industry chain is expected to usher in a year of significant development

With the boom in Agent applications and the multimodal ecosystem, the global Token usage volume is entering a new round of rapid acceleration. According to OpenRouter data, over the past year, the weekly number of Tokens consumed increased from 2.1T to 24.5T, and since 2026, weekly Token consumption has increased by 280%. Domestic model providers and cloud platforms have cut the quotas and discounts for Coding Plan one after another. Products such as Zhipu’s Coding Plan have shown signs of purchase limits. Judging from core providers, according to announcements from each company, ByteDance (Doubao) in China achieved an average daily Token consumption of 0.63 trillion in December 2025, which is basically in the same order of magnitude as overseas leaders OpenAI (0.52 trillion) and Google (0.65 trillion). Meanwhile, Doubao’s average daily Token consumption in March 2026 surpassed 1.2 trillion, achieving roughly double growth within three months.

In addition, SemiAnalysis data shows that the price of compute power leasing is trending upward. As of April 2026, overseas H100 leasing prices increased by 40% within five months. The current high level of optimism in the compute power leasing industry is mainly driven by a supply-demand mismatch in China’s compute power market: downstream large-model and internet companies’ demand for compute power has surged, while some domestically produced high-end chips are, to a certain extent, constrained by bottlenecks in foundry production capacity. As a result, the positioning advantage of leading leasing companies that control high-end compute chip resources has become even more pronounced.

CITIC Securities said that, with the boom in Agent applications and the multimodal ecosystem, there is a mismatch between capital expenditures and compute power demand, and the global Token usage volume is entering a new round of accelerated growth. Over the next two years, the cloud industry chain is expected to enter a “volume and price rising” development year. In terms of the cloud industry chain, demand drives up the price level, and the cloud industry chain enters a cycle of volume and price rising. For compute power leasing, the supply of high-quality compute power chips is tight, and the positioning advantage of leading compute power leasing companies stands out, with higher leverage improving the certainty of high growth. It is recommended to pay attention to stocks related to the cloud industry chain and compute power leasing.