“Tokens are the new commodity,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, clad in his iconic leather jacket, at the company’s annual flagship developer conference, GTC, last week in San Jose, California. The chip designer’s helmsman wants to recast his company not as a silicon vendor but as the architect of what he calls “AI [artificial intelligence] factories”, whose standard product is “token”. While Nvidia is busy writing the rules of a new token economy, a parallel debate is emerging in China around the...