Lenovo is adding usage-priced AI inference to its server business, moving it closer to cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud and Tencent, which already run Zhangjiakou data centers.
Lenovo launched a brand for AI "token factories" on November 10 and said the first of them, which it calls a mother factory (母本工厂), will be built in Zhangjiakou, a data-center hub in Hebei province. The Beike Finance unit of the Beijing News reported that the first phase is planned to produce more than 2,000 trillion (2 quadrillion) tokens a year.
A token is the small chunk of text, roughly a word or part of a word, that an AI model reads and writes, and model makers charge customers per million tokens. A token factory, in the sense Lenovo and other Chinese companies now use, is a data center packaged and run to sell AI inference, the work of answering requests with a trained model, measured and priced by the tokens it produces. Lenovo’s new brand is the Lenovo Wanquan Hybrid Token Factory (联想万全混合词元工厂), and it groups Lenovo’s servers, software and AI agent products around that idea.
The capacity figures are plans, and the reports give no construction cost. Lenovo’s own announcement could not be found on its websites, so the details below come from journalists who covered the Zhangjiakou event.
The Zhangjiakou plan sets numbers for output, cost and power use
Beike Finance reported that the initial phase is designed for a peak of 200 million tokens per second and 100,000 users at the same time, and that core capacity measures are expected to rise at least tenfold by 2030. Lenovo says the Zhangjiakou site will start with a 15,000P heterogeneous computing cluster and a data center of about 100MW. Beike said Lenovo will sell token services to partners and enterprise customers as well as using the capacity for its own AI business.
Trade publication e-works listed Lenovo’s targets for each completed factory: five times more tokens per second, a token quality pass rate above 99.9%, a 70% cut in the all-in cost per million tokens, and a power usage effectiveness below 1.1. That last measure compares a data center’s total power draw with what its computers use, so 1.1 means little energy goes to cooling and other overhead.
Executive Vice President and China President Liu Jun described two parts to the business, according to Beike: building and running the computing centers, and XCloud, Lenovo’s software for managing private and public cloud resources together. Senior Vice President Dai Wei, who heads China solutions and services, said some Zhangjiakou facilities will act as sample plants for testing production and operating measures.
Zhangjiakou offers cheap power, but token economics are unproven
Zhangjiakou is part of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei hub of the national East Data, West Computing (东数西算) program. Beike cited official data showing the city has 55 data centers, 1.07 million racks in operation and 310,000P of AI computing capacity. Alibaba Cloud began building there in 2015, followed by Tencent, China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom and others. EastFrontier reported in October that Chinese AI infrastructure is moving toward production inference and token factories, and a Zhangjiakou official said the new site will help Zhangjiakou build one scheduling platform linking computers from different vendors.
Lenovo has the AI hardware sales to supply such sites. Beike cited Lenovo’s results for the quarter to June 2026: revenue of US$26.9 billion, up 43% from a year earlier, of which AI-related revenue was US$9.3 billion, up 60% and 35% of the total.
The business case is harder to judge. Ying Ying, chief computer-sector analyst at China Securities, said that the value of the token economy depends on whether customers actually become more productive using AI and whether compute providers can turn a steady profit, according to Beike. Ying added that Zhangjiakou’s green power and climate could lower operating costs, but investors will watch whether that turns into stable orders and high utilization.
Lenovo wants a national network of themed factories
China News Service quoted Dai Wei as saying that tokens have become a new unit of measurement for the AI era, and that whoever can supply high-quality tokens stably, cheaply and securely will be an important contributor to it.
Lenovo plans further factories matched to regional industries, from heavy industry in the northeast to education in the northwest, according to e-works. In central China it is working with Hunan Broadcasting System on a factory for film and short-drama production, aiming to cut content costs by 50% and production time by 60% and to draw more than 10,000 creators, according to e-works and China News Service. Hong Kong financial news service AASTOCKS and Sing Tao Global Network also reported the launch.
The first test is whether Lenovo names enterprise customers and prices for Zhangjiakou tokens, and whether its quarterly results begin to report token services as a separate revenue line.