China is processing 140 trillion tokens per day, up from 100 billion at the start of 2024, and the surge is minting new market leaders: MiniMax now ranks fourth globally by AI market share, behind only Alphabet, Anthropic, and OpenAI, while its shares are up 440% since listing and Zhipu's have jumped 750%. Both have surpassed Baidu and Kuaishou in market capitalization. China's structural cost advantage — cheap electricity and a dense field of competing model developers — lets MiniMax charge roughly $1 per million output tokens versus $15+ for Anthropic's Claude, accelerating what Beijing has framed as a strategic "token export" push.