Guangdong is rolling out its first financial product built around the token economy — a "Token loan" that lets AI companies use their token consumption to secure bank credit. In Guangzhou's Haizhu district, banks will now factor how many tokens a business burns through into its loan limit.
Take Bank of China's Guangzhou branch. Its new "Computing Token Loan" targets small and medium-sized computing firms in Haizhu. The bank looks at contracts and token usage to set credit lines, offering credit loans, accounts receivable pledges, and order financing. You can stack on guarantees or collateral to bump the limit even higher.
Newly founded companies are eligible too. If you can show continuous operating records from a previous enterprise, or bring in a guarantor, you can qualify for order financing. Bank of China's trial credit has already reached 28 million yuan.
Haizhu has been using tokens as a carrot for AI firms for a while: hit a daily average of 100 million, 500 million, or 1 billion tokens over the past six months, and you'll land different tiers of computing subsidies. Now tokens are making their way into the bank lending system — evolving from a metric for government handouts into a metric for underwriting. That's a quiet but significant shift for how AI companies get financed.