Singles' Day 2026: AI Tokens Become a Hit on Alibaba and JD.com

China’s Singles’ Day shopping festival has a surprising new bestseller in 2026: AI tokens, the credits people use to pay for AI chatbots and assistants. Alibaba’s Tmall and rival JD.com are selling token packages from Chinese AI companies like phone top-ups, and a single livestream on 2 November moved about 100,000 AI memberships in half an hour. It is the first year AI tokens have been a significant consumer category in the world’s largest shopping event, which ends on 11 November.

What happened?

On Monday, 2 November, top livestreamer Li Jiaqi, known as the “Lipstick King” for his beauty sales, sold AI products on his Taobao Live channel for the first time. According to Alibaba, he sold about 100,000 monthly memberships of QwenWork, Alibaba’s office AI service, within 30 minutes, Reuters reported. Together the memberships represent roughly 2 trillion tokens.

Chen Yusen, an Alibaba Group vice president and the chief executive of QwenWork, joined Li on the stream. Chinese media, including CGTN and RADII, reported that the membership cards were offered at a promotional price of 0.01 yuan each, while Reuters said it was unclear how big the discount on the token plans was. The broadcast also featured QwenWork token plans, AI laptops and workplace gadgets.

What are AI tokens, and why are shoppers buying them?

Tokens are the units AI language models use to measure the text they read and write, and they are how many AI services bill for usage. On Chinese shopping platforms they are sold in two main ways, CGTN explained: prepaid credits that work like a mobile phone top-up, and subscription packages that give a set amount of usage for a month or a year. These are aimed at regular users such as office workers, content creators and small teams, who use AI to summarise meetings, draft video scripts or condense long reports.

Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, told Reuters that Chinese consumers are very used to AI productivity tools and that heavy users can run out of credits. Stocking up during a sale is “a very reasonable action,” he said.

Key details: Tmall vs JD.com

• Tmall’s AI Token Center: Tmall opened a token recharge centre on 3 September, with Alibaba Cloud, Zhipu (Z.ai), Kimi maker Moonshot AI, MiniMax and DeepSeek among the first providers, according to IT Times via 36Kr and CGTN. Alibaba’s own Alizila newsroom lists AI tokens as a new category for this year’s festival.
• JD.com’s token section: JD.com has launched its own AI token area with services from DeepSeek, Z.ai and ByteDance’s Volcano Engine, Reuters reported. CGTN said JD.com brought packages from more than 10 model providers to a 2 November livestream, where token sales on its electronics channel reportedly rose 20-fold within two hours.
• Growth figures: Alibaba says AI token plan sales from 1 to 20 October rose 450% from the previous month. IT Times reported that subscription token products on Taobao and Tmall grew more than 160% month on month.
• Festival prices: IT Times listed offers such as a Qwen AI Lite monthly card for 39 yuan (normally 60 yuan), Qwen Office Standard for 197.99 yuan (normally 247 yuan) and half price on the first month of MiniMax’s M plan.
• AI hardware: Sales of AI laptops jumped more than 300% year on year in the first hour of the Singles’ Day checkout period, Reuters reported.

Si Dengyu, general manager of Tmall’s 3C digital division, said the goal is to “make buying Tokens as convenient as topping up phone credits,” IT Times reported.

Why it matters

Singles’ Day has run since 2009 and generated 1.70 trillion yuan (about $255 billion) in sales across platforms last year, according to data provider Syntun, cited by Reuters. Putting AI subscriptions next to phones and cosmetics shows how fast AI has become an everyday consumer purchase in China. IT Times cited official figures showing daily token usage in China passed 500 trillion as of July.

For Alibaba, the push links its two biggest bets: ecommerce and its Qwen AI models. In May it connected the Qwen app to the full Taobao and Tmall catalogue, letting users compare products and try on clothes virtually, according to Alizila. AI is reshaping online shopping in the West too, as we reported in our coverage of Shopify’s Q3 results, where AI shopping traffic surged.

What are the risks for buyers?

There are concerns. CGTN noted that different AI models split the same Chinese text into different numbers of tokens, so two packages with the same quota may not deliver the same amount of computing. With no common standard, comparing prices across platforms is difficult. Su also warned Reuters that AI tools change quickly, so shoppers may be wary of prepaying for services that could be replaced or retired. If you are weighing up AI plans yourself, see our guide to ChatGPT Plus vs Claude Pro vs Gemini.

What happens next?

The festival runs until 11 November, after which Alibaba and JD.com usually share headline results. It is not yet clear whether the platforms will report AI token sales separately, but the early numbers suggest AI credits could become a regular fixture of China’s big shopping events.