The three major operators' computing power revenue increases, fully shifting to Token services as the main business focus.

Recently, the three major telecom operators’ 2025 annual reports have been released one after another. Overall, the operators’ key performance indicators have been running at a high level, but in terms of total volume, the situation of sluggish growth has not been significantly improved. Structural revenue growth such as computing power services, innovative businesses, and international business remains the main highlight.

In 2025, the three operators’ key focus for investment in basic resources continues to tilt toward computing power. Reporters noted that, according to the disclosed capital expenditure plans, computing power-related investment remains a key priority for operators this year. Of course, the focus of intelligent computing infrastructure also has to revolve around how to monetize it. Judging from the statements made by the three operators, Token (term) operations will gradually become the main line.

The revenue balance shifts

In 2025, China Mobile achieved operating revenue of 1,050.2 billion yuan, up 0.9%, and net profit of 137.1 billion yuan, down 0.9%; China Telecom’s 2025 operating revenue was 523.9 billion yuan, up 0.07%, and net profit was 33.2 billion yuan, up 0.5%; China Unicom’s operating revenue was 392.2 billion yuan, up 0.68%, and net profit was 20.82 billion yuan (based on the Hong Kong-listed company reporting scope), up 0.98%.

Overall, the three operators’ revenue and profit indicators continue to stay at a high level, but they all show the same pattern of weak growth momentum. From their annual reports, the business highlights of the three operators still concentrate on structural changes in revenue.

According to data disclosed by China Mobile, in 2025, the company’s data center revenue increased 8.7% year over year, including AIDC (artificial intelligence data centers) revenue, which increased 35.4% year over year. Driven by rapid growth in demand for intelligent computing, intelligent computing services have become the primary engine of growth, with a growth rate of 279%, pulling cloud computing services revenue to increase 13.9% year over year.

In 2025, China Telecom’s industrial digitalization business revenue reached 147.3 billion yuan. Strategic emerging businesses continued to grow at a relatively fast pace: Tianyi Cloud revenue reached 120.7 billion yuan, AIDC revenue reached 34.5 billion yuan, security revenue reached 16.6 billion yuan, and intelligent revenue reached 12.3 billion yuan. Vision network revenue increased 31.2% year over year, quantum revenue increased 65.4% year over year, and satellite business revenue increased 30.7% year over year.

In 2025, China Unicom’s revenue share from strategic emerging industries exceeded 86%. The revenue share from computing power business exceeded 15%, up 1.1 percentage points from the previous year. Artificial intelligence revenue increased by more than 140% year over year.

Focus on computing power investment

Changes in revenue structure indicate that the operators’ emphasis in operations will adjust accordingly. The most direct manifestation is that, across the board, operators have fully shifted their focus in infrastructure development toward computing power.

For infrastructure development, China Telecom’s general manager, Liu Guoqing, said the company continues to build a new generation of AIDC infrastructure oriented toward intelligent computing. It has already built 15 hundred-megawatt-level hub-node AIDC parks, with network latency at the hub nodes below 12 milliseconds.

China Unicom’s chairman, Dong Xin, said the company strengthens the resource layout of “east data, west computing” hub nodes and demonstration provinces for green computing power, with a rack scale of more than 1.1 million racks. The company has built seven hundred-megawatt-level AIDC parks, with an intelligent computing scale of 45 EFLOPS (45 billion billion floating-point operations per second).

Reporters noted that China Unicom’s capital expenditure in 2025 is expected to be around 50 billion yuan, with the proportion of computing power investment exceeding 35%. Dong Xin said the company will focus on “computing power” as the core, build computing power infrastructure in a moderately forward-looking way, strengthen integrated operations of the computing power service platform, and use new algorithms and new technologies to promote the integrated development of cloud, network, and edge. The company aims to make computing power as readily available “as water and as electricity,” serving “on demand,” and to become the core engine for building new-quality productive forces.

Strengthen Token operations

In fact, China Mobile’s “strong capability” goals also include strengthening Token operations.

As of now, China Mobile’s offline channels have already installed the “raise dragon shrimp” application for tens of thousands of customers. More than 40,000 customers use the company’s mobile cloud computing power service to “raise dragon shrimp.” In addition, according to data disclosed in China Mobile’s annual report, the company has built an intelligent computing cluster of more than 10,000 cards, accumulating more than 400,000 billion Token high-quality datasets, and has deployed 50 industry large models.

Similarly, China Telecom has also emphasized its strategic orientation toward strengthening Token operations in its annual report and performance briefings. The company has gathered general large-model corpus data from more than 10,000 billion Tokens and high-quality datasets covering more than 14 industries, with total data volume exceeding 500TB.

“In the intelligent era, to build a new form of intelligent economy, we must accelerate the transformation and upgrading from ‘traffic-based operations’ to ‘Token-based operations.’ Last year, we proposed a five-in-one intelligent cloud system, which is the Token-based operations system,” Liu Guoqing said. China Telecom’s Token operations have already had initial practice—for example, in a case of private deployment on the Yirong platform for a large enterprise. The company custom-developed 73 agents, driving annual consumption of 1.2 trillion Tokens.

Liu Guoqing said that Token services are the main operational line for China Telecom going forward. The company will strengthen its own Tokens, grow ecosystem Tokens, and actively explore international Token operations.

(Source: Securities Times)