AI tokens, the prepaid credits that pay for chatbot and model usage, have become one of the surprise categories of China's Singles Day festival, which ends on Wednesday, Nov. 11. Alibaba's Tmall said transaction value in its token category rose 450% from the previous month on the first day of its promotion, and sales of token packages on a JD.com livestream channel rose 20-fold within two hours, CGTN reported, citing the platform and media reports.

For investors, the numbers matter less for their size than for what they test. Alibaba, JD.com and China's model developers have spent heavily on artificial intelligence, and most of the revenue so far has come from companies renting cloud computing. Singles Day is the first time token packages have been sold to individual consumers as a major product segment at the event, according to ChinaRetailNews.com. If households and freelancers will pay for AI credits the way they top up a mobile phone, it opens a second source of income for the sector.

Alibaba sends its lipstick king to sell Qwen

Alibaba's biggest push came on Monday, Nov. 2, when Li Jiaqi, the livestreamer known as the "Lipstick King" for his cosmetics sales, hosted a Taobao Live broadcast featuring Chen Yusen, an Alibaba Group vice president and chief executive of QwenWork, the company's office AI service. It was Li's first broadcast selling AI products, ChinaRetailNews.com reported.

Nearly 100,000 personal monthly memberships for Qwen's AI services sold within 30 minutes, priced at 0.01 yuan each, according to CGTN. That works out to roughly 2 trillion tokens of usage, CGTN said, citing media reports; ChinaRetailNews.com attributed the same estimate to Alibaba. The one-fen price means the event was a customer acquisition exercise rather than a revenue source, and Alibaba has not said how many buyers keep paying once the promotional month ends.

The broadcast also sold QwenWork token plans, AI-enabled laptops and workplace devices, ChinaRetailNews.com reported.

Tmall laid the ground for the category weeks earlier. It opened a dedicated token recharge center on Sept. 3, initially listing services from Alibaba Cloud, Zhipu AI, Kimi, MiniMax and DeepSeek, according to CGTN. That puts Alibaba's own Qwen models on the same digital shelf as rivals, with Tmall taking the transaction either way. Capital Times reported on the center when Tmall opened its festival with a record 1 million brands.

JD.com lines up more than 10 model makers

JD.com took a broader approach. It brought token packages from more than 10 large-model providers to a promotional livestream on Nov. 2, and sales on its 3C and digital products channel rose 20-fold within two hours, according to media reports cited by CGTN. JD has not published a value for those sales.

The packages are sold in two forms, CGTN said: prepaid credits that work like phone top-ups, and subscriptions with a fixed amount of usage over a month or a year. The subscriptions are aimed at office workers, content creators and small teams who use AI to summarize meeting minutes, draft video scripts or condense long reports.

The comparison problem is real. Different models split the same Chinese text into different numbers of tokens, so two quotas of the same size may not buy the same amount of computing, CGTN noted. With no common standard for measuring tokens, shoppers cannot easily compare prices across platforms, a problem that grows as the services move from corporate buyers to consumers.

A longer, quieter festival

The token sales came in a festival that platforms stretched across more than a month. JD.com started its Singles Day spot sales on Oct. 12, mainly for home appliances and digital devices, and Tmall took presale deposits with final payments due on Oct. 20, the Global Times reported. Discounts were expected to peak on the evening of Nov. 10 and on Nov. 11.

The longer window has spread spending out rather than lifting it. Hu Qimu, a professor at Huaqiao University's Maritime Silk Road Institute, told the Global Times that "festival fever" is weaker than a few years ago as shoppers grow more rational. Online retail sales of goods and services rose 4.6% from a year earlier to 13.48 trillion yuan ($2.01 trillion) in the first eight months of 2026, the paper said, citing Xinhua.

Alibaba and JD.com have not given a value for token sales. The next hard read on whether AI services can earn money from consumers will come from their quarterly results, where investors will look for any disclosure on token revenue and paid Qwen subscribers after the 0.01 yuan trials lapse.