A state-backed platform in Haikou wants to make artificial intelligence cheap enough for ordinary businesses to actually use — and it's betting on free tokens to get there.
On a humid Saturday in Haikou, a room full of officials and executives watched a screen light up with a number most companies never get to see attached to their own name: one hundred trillion. That's how many AI tokens Hainan's provincial government is prepared to hand out for free, through a new platform it hopes will do for local businesses what cheap electricity once did for factories.
The Hainan Artificial Intelligence Service Platform went live on June 13 at a launch event in the provincial capital, built and bankrolled by two state-owned firms — Hainan Information Industry Investment Group and Hainan Computing Power Technology. Unlike a lot of AI initiatives that arrive as little more than a press release, this one showed up with actual inventory: 121 large language models and 44 industry-specific AI agents, already sitting on the shelf and ready for local companies to plug into.
The pitch is refreshingly plain: most small and mid-sized businesses want to use AI but can't justify the bill. So the platform's operators rolled out what they're calling the Hundred-Trillion Token Empowerment Plan — a straightforward offer of free compute credit to any registered enterprise that applies. Wu Kunren, general manager of the state investment group behind the project, put it bluntly at the launch: the plan exists to solve the problem of AI being, in his words, something companies simply "can't afford to use."
"The platform isn't chasing headlines about AI — it's trying to remove the one excuse every small business owner has for not touching it: cost."
Four pillars, one storefront
Structurally, the platform is organized around four sections that map neatly onto what a company actually needs when it decides to adopt AI. There's raw computing power for anyone running heavier workloads, a model-as-a-service marketplace where businesses can rent access to pretrained models instead of building their own, a token trading market that functions almost like a currency exchange for compute credits, and an agent application marketplace stocked with ready-made AI tools built for specific industries.
Two other initiatives launched alongside the token giveaway. One offers hands-on support to help government departments and enterprises actually get AI systems running, rather than just handing them access and walking away. The other focuses on cloud access for businesses running domestic, government-approved software stacks — a detail that matters more in China's regulatory environment than it might elsewhere.
Why Hainan, and why now
Hainan has spent the last few years building an identity as China's experimental free-trade zone — a tropical island with tax breaks, looser cross-border data rules, and a mandate from Beijing to try things other provinces can't. AI fits that mandate well. Ma Yonghua, who heads the provincial state assets commission, framed the launch as part of a broader "Smart Hainan" push, describing it as proof that state-owned enterprises can lead on innovation rather than just fund it from the sidelines.
There's also a practical roadmap behind the token giveaway. Officials say the next step is building what they're calling a "token factory" — essentially scaling up local compute production and exporting it, with early focus on three industries Hainan already has a foothold in: seed breeding and agriculture, aerospace (Hainan is home to the Wenchang launch site), and healthcare. The goal, as officials described it, is to turn Hainan into a template other provinces can copy.
None of this happens without the physical network underneath it. Ping Yizhen, head of Hainan's communications regulator, said the province's telecom operators will keep upgrading island-wide networks and reworking how computing power is distributed, so the platform has the bandwidth and low latency that training large models and running live agents actually requires.
It's early days — the platform launched barely a month ago, and the real test will be whether local businesses, especially smaller ones without in-house tech teams, actually show up to claim those free tokens. But the ambition is clear: Hainan isn't just trying to use AI. It's trying to become the place other provinces point to when they explain how it's done.
Figures and quotes in this piece are drawn from the platform's June 13 launch event and subsequent state media coverage.
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