"China turned AI gunpowder into fireworks"? The viral 55% token figure comes from a short-drama company's investor roadshow

Why it matters

【Key points】

A post claiming that "in the AI era, China has once again turned gunpowder into fireworks" has spread widely on Chinese-language X: it says 55% of China's tokens go to short dramas, short video and entertainment, while 58% of US tokens go to coding, R&D and enterprise automation. The most-shared version has about 150,000 views, nearly 800 likes and over 200 replies, and related posts reached about 100 in the past 24 hours and are still rising, with many replies asking whether the numbers are real.

【Verifiable】

The China half has a source. An investor-relations record that COL Group (300364.SZ) filed on cninfo on June 3, 2026 says that "of all token consumption in China, AI short dramas and video generation rank first at 55%, followed by e-commerce and marketing at 24%, while software development accounts for only 15%." It summarizes June 1-2 roadshows with brokers and funds and gives no data source or method. COL itself sells AI short-drama production, and the same record says its own weekly token usage is growing more than 20% week over week. The post gives no source for the US 58% figure, and we could not find public data measured the same way.

【Our read】

These numbers cannot show who is wasting AI. First, the two halves are not comparable: one is a nationwide share quoted by a short-drama company at an investor roadshow, the other has no known source. Second, token volume measures compute burned, not value: a 1080p video clip consumes far more tokens than a coding request, and the record itself says live-action AI dramas use two to three times the tokens of 720p animated ones, plus repeated regeneration. By token share, video always ranks first. The better questions are where paying demand sits and how fast coding usage is growing. Short dramas scale up compute demand and push prices down, which makes inference cheaper for developers too. Calling that fireworks draws a verdict on China's AI industry from one listed company's sales pitch.