Some 55% of the tokens consumed by artificial intelligence in China go to generating short dramas and videos. That is what the listed company Chinese Online (中文在线) says in an investor-relations document, which also puts e-commerce and advertising at 24% and software development at just 15%. The figure, shared widely on social media, fuelled the claim that "half of China's compute is making dramas."
A token is the basic unit with which a model processes text, images or video, and token consumption measures the work the AI actually does. According to the company, the drama sector uses more tokens because it needs fast video generation and a very quick turnaround. In dramas with synthetic actors, consumption is two to three times that of animated series, because production generates and discards many frames before getting the one the director wants.
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The context is a large market. According to a report from the Development Research Center of China's state broadcasting administration, the global micro-drama market exceeded $18 billion in 2025, with China above $14 billion, or 77.78% of the total. In the first eight months of 2026, 430,000 micro-dramas went online in China, thirteen times all of 2025. In the same weeks, as AlexTech reported, AI-generated titles had already reached 95% of the first quarter's output.
The figure is disputed, however. A spokesperson for Doubao, ByteDance's assistant, wrote on Weibo that it was "unreliable": only about 10% of the group's total compute, he said, goes to video generation. That rebuttal comes from a company account, so it is a party's statement, while the original figure comes from a company document. ByteDance has not said how the remaining 90% is divided. The group is nonetheless one of the main players in the chain: according to a Nomura study cited in the press, its Seedance model is used in about 80-90% of AI drama production.
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The question also bears on how China's AI race is judged. Some commentators read the figure as a sign of development skewed towards entertainment. The Party newspaper People's Daily replied that token consumption measures market flow, not the industry's overall ledger, and that video generation also serves industrial training and autonomous-driving simulation.
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