When local city investment started selling tokens, did this student agree?
Author: Little Cake
Original title: When Local City Investment Starts Selling Tokens
On July 30, the Jiaxing Yangtze River Delta (Jiaxing) Token Operation Center was officially launched.
The operator standing in front of the stage is Jiaxing City Investment and Development Group, an urban construction state-owned enterprise that has repaired roads, bridges, gas, and renovated the city.
During the investigation, city leaders asked what everyone wanted to ask in their hearts: “Why did you do CITIC?”
In the past 20 years, the default division of labor in China's urbanization was: government development, urban construction and road construction, and enterprises moving to the building. Now, a state-owned urban construction enterprise has begun to personally sell tokens.
Someone interpreted it,Token profits peaked on the day the city entered the market.
The one that built the road sold the Token
First, clarify a concept: CITIC does not directly produce tokens, nor does it build a Wanka cluster. Ma Yinxiao, the head of the operation center, put it bluntly: “We are carriers,” which means integrating scattered computing power and models to become a “model wholesaler.”
Take the Jiaxing model as an example. Its core is the “five unifications”, which unify API entry, unify token measurement, unify fee settlement, unify policy deductions, and unify security audits.
Once connected, enterprises can use more than 100 mainstream models such as DeepSeek and Qwen as needed, and provide three types of services: inclusive packages, on-demand packages, and exclusive customization. The goal is to make AI capabilities “as convenient and transparent as water and electricity, and can be used as needed”.
Why is local CITIC starting to sell tokens now?
China's infrastructure construction over the past 30 years has a clear path:Once any new type of infrastructure is recognized as a “public service” by the country, it will follow the same path. Private capital first explores the path, then state-owned platforms take over the operation, and eventually become municipal utilities.
Water, electricity, gas, broadband, all without exception.
Pathfinders are responsible for proving the existence of demand, and state-owned assets are responsible for turning it into a public good that can be used by humans, at a manageable price, and operated for a long time.
Jiaxing's operation this time, from a logical point of view,That is, the computing power infrastructure has reached the “state-owned assets takeover” stage of this path.
Moreover, Jiaxing has a strong reputation: as a national computing power hub city, the city has gathered four 10,000 card computing power centers, Runze, Ali, China Telecom, and China Mobile, which rank first in Zhejiang in terms of computing power; on the industrial side, the city has 6,327 regulated industrial enterprises and more than 230 AI science and innovation enterprises.
Road construction aggregates scattered travel needs into a toll road network, and selling tokens aggregates scattered AI requirements into a measurable computing power network. The subject is different, and the method is the same.
An increasingly crowded table
CITIC is not the only state-owned player who wants to sell tokens.
In the spring of 2026, the three major operators announced their entry into the “Token Hour” almost simultaneously.
China Telecom Chairman Ke Ruiwen's original phrase was “An intelligent cloud system is a word management system.” China Mobile wants to promote “Byte+Token double high-speed growth,” and Shanghai Mobile directly launched a general service of 1 yuan 400,000 tokens, which can even pay phone bills.
Operators' motivation to switch to Token is simple: in 2025, China Mobile's revenue growth rate was 0.9%, China Telecom 0.07%, and China Unicom 0.68%.
The growth rate of all three companies fell to less than 1%, and the traditional traffic business peaked, and new measurement units must be found to support the growth curve. From selling Bytes to selling Tokens, the underlying logic hasn't changed. Whoever controls the next generation of “pipelines” can charge toll fees.
Looking further up, cloud vendors (Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Baidu Smart Cloud) are selling tokens, model companies (DeepSeek, Smart Spectrum, KIMI) are selling tokens, token factories (silicon-based streaming) are selling tokens, transit stations are selling tokens... Now, even CITIC has arrived.
List the players on this table: model companies, cloud vendors, token factories, the three major operators, and local city investors. From upstream to downstream, from making tokens to transporting tokens to distributing tokens, the entire industry chain is focused on the act of “selling tokens.”
As mentioned above, tokens are being fully electrified, so the profit margin for “selling tokens” will drop dramatically.
On the one hand, the acquisition cost of AI capabilities will continue to decrease, the threshold for enterprises and individuals to use AI will disappear, and tokens will become the underlying supply for the digital economy like water and electricity.
On the other hand, the profit margin of simply selling tokens will be infinitely close to selling tap water and electricity. The gross profit is extremely thin, and the scale is king. In the end, only big manufacturers and players with a state-owned background can support this kind of business with low gross profit and high capital density.
This is the reason CITI was able to enter the market, and it was also a sign that the track's profits peaked after the city entered the market.
The entry of CITI is equivalent to an industry's “valuation anchoring” incident.At a time when the most conservative, risk-averse, and most dependent on policy subsidies all started this business, the excess profits of this business may have disappeared.
Who made the money for the water?
Selling tap water has never been the person who makes the most money.
Urban investment has been repairing water pipes, building water plants, and piping networks for decades, and profit margins have always hovered in single digits. The money made from water was Coca Cola, Starbucks, and Nongfu Spring. They turn water into drinks, coffee, and “nature's carrier.”
Token's value chain is replicating this structure.
Bytes are dreams. The bottom layer consumes tokens for the video generation model SeedDance, but users pay to buy “a video work”; programming assistants such as Cursor and Windsurf run code model tokens at the bottom, but developers buy “code production efficiency”...
The rules are clear: the closer you are to the end user, the more you can translate token consumption into a “value unit” that users are willing to pay for, and the higher the profit margin. The farther away from end users and the more they sell naked tokens, the closer they are to the low-profit model of utilities.
Of course, selling tokens will continue to be hot.
Even if it's the most profitable AI app today, the bottom layer still sells tokens when the shell is taken apart. That is, Dream sells SeedDance, and Claude Code sells inference tokens. The difference is that they wrap the token in a “value shell” that users are willing to pay for, a video, a function, and a conversation.Without this layer of shell, Token is tap water; with this layer of shell, Token is Coca Cola.
There is a ready-made example in Jiaxing.
Pinghu Shijie Technology's AI intelligent design platform relies on standardized token services to reduce the design cycle of down jackets, bags, and children's clothing from “weekly” to “hourly”, increasing development efficiency by up to 30 times and reducing printing costs by at least 50%. What this company consumes is tokens, but what it sells is design ability.
This is probably the meaning of Jiaxing's style of play: Relying on a solid industrial chassis with new local textile materials, smart terminals, and high-end equipment, the operation center sells not only naked tokens, but also “Token+ industry scenarios.”
When a token is embedded in a real workflow, a quotation assistant, and quality inspection AI that understands circuit diagrams, it changes from a unit of measurement to a production tool, and only production tools have a premium.
From “units of measurement” to “production tools”, from tap water to cola, the distance in between is the true value range of CITIC's new business.
The water pipes have been laid out, and the recipe for Cola is still on the way.
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