Token factories head to HKEX: SiliconFlow gross margin falls to -24% as Jiuzhang stays infrastructure-heavy
创业邦 · wechat · 2026-10-20
A wave of AI infrastructure companies built on token sales is heading to public markets: Jiuzhang Cloud filed for a Hong Kong IPO on September 29 aiming to be the first listed intelligent-computing cloud, SiliconFlow filed in late June, and Infinigence was reported to have filed confidentially in October while closing a 2.3 billion yuan Series C for 4.3 billion yuan total.
Demand: China's daily token usage rose from about 100 billion in early 2024 to 100 trillion by end-2025 and over 140 trillion by March 2026, a more than 1,000x increase in just over two years. Jensen Huang framed data centers as token factories at GTC 2026.
Three camps: Cloud providers like Alibaba Cloud, Volcano Engine and Baidu AI Cloud dominate, with the top three holding 87% of 2025 token throughput and SiliconFlow fourth at 1.5%; startups like Infinigence and SiliconFlow focus on inference optimization and heterogeneous scheduling; infrastructure players like Jiuzhang extend into token billing, launching Alaya Token in H1 2026.
Financials: SiliconFlow's 2025 revenue was 55.33 million yuan, up 653.2%, but gross margin fell from 39.4% to -24% with a net loss of about 345 million yuan; public cloud gross margin was -119% versus 82.5% for on-premise deployments. Jiuzhang's 2025 revenue was 1.098 billion yuan, over 90% from intelligent-computing infrastructure solutions and only 7.1% from cloud services.
Conclusion: Demand is growing but price competition is intensifying, with some models cutting prices sharply; utilization and inference efficiency, not GPU count, determine profitability.
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