The Lingang Special Area, a crucial testing ground for economic and trade policies within the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, aims to become a globally influential hub for exporting token services as its significance in China’s digital trade continues to grow.
In the international supply chain for token services, Lingang doesn’t serve as a processing center for computing power nor as a physical transmission route. Instead, it functions as a central operations hub linking domestic output with global markets, as well as a cluster for rule makers, settlement centers, compliance certification venues, and premium service providers, according to the deputy head of the area’s data division.
Token service exports involve converting electricity into computing power, then into tokens, which are quickly and compliantly transmitted to global users via submarine fiber-optic cables. As Chinese large language models rapidly expand worldwide due to their strong cost-performance ratios, these services are emerging as a new avenue for China’s digital economy to export value.
The model in Lingang is designed for overseas demand to flow into the area where model inference and service processing occur locally before the results are sent back to users globally through submarine fiber-optic cables. Settlement processes are handled domestically, ensuring that tax revenues stay within China.
Companies in Lingang have reported a diverse array of token export requests. For instance, there’s demand from Cambodia to process local Angkor cultural data for delivery to global gaming and film studios, from Southeast Asia for AI-powered educational tools, and from Europe and the United States to support AI services for smart hardware.
Lingang’s potential as a major global token services export hub is supported by four core strengths. The area boasts a wide range of token application scenarios across sectors like digital culture, autonomous vehicles, and consumer electronics. It has a comprehensive infrastructure base and is working on mutual recognition of international data regulations across various categories. Furthermore, robust policy support is in place for these services, according to officials.
The infrastructure includes compliant global data links, international data centers physically separated from the domestic internet but connected to global data networks, eight major computing centers with a combined capacity of 108 EFLOPS, and high-speed international dedicated lines to Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore with latency as low as 23 milliseconds.
To establish Lingang as a “globally influential hub for token service trade,” plans are underway to develop a one-stop compliance service platform. This platform will offer comprehensive support services, such as data security assessments, standard contract creation, cross-border regulatory inquiries, and automatic system adaptations.
The area also intends to explore privacy computing, blockchain technology, regulatory sandboxes, and other innovations to transition firms’ compliance from manual reviews to real-time monitoring, dynamic record-keeping, and end-to-end traceability. Efforts will also be made to promote mutual recognition of international rules, encouraging more global clients to confidently utilize Chinese token services.
Additionally, Lingang aims to foster a more comprehensive industrial ecosystem to support overseas expansion by attracting a variety of entities—including computing power providers, model developers, cloud service providers, data merchants, cross-border payment firms, insurance companies, and legal agencies dedicated to protecting overseas rights.