China Mobile has put a number on its 2027 ambitions. According to a November 7 report by the Star Market Daily, procurement is expected to exceed 500 billion yuan in total, and more than 100 billion yuan of that is earmarked for compute. Management spoke on November 6 and called compute the biggest increment in the company's investment. The plan builds on multiple 10,000-GPU clusters already running, with several ultra-large computing clusters now being laid out. Compute capacity is set to double in each of the next two years. Three gigawatt-scale computing campuses broke ground this year, two more come next year, and the total will reach seven.
The ramp-up is hard to miss. In 2025 China Mobile planned 37.3 billion yuan of compute investment; the 2026 plan calls for compute-network capital expenditure to rise 62.4% to 37.8 billion yuan. The rest of the sector is telling a similar story in its earnings. China Unicom posted 294.6 billion yuan of revenue in the first three quarters of 2026, with compute revenue up 12.2% and intelligent-computing-center revenue up 10.4%, alongside 1.2 million standard racks and 3,000MW of IDC capacity. China Mobile's first-half compute service revenue grew 14.0%, with AIDC revenue up 486.1% and intelligent computing services up 130.1%. China Telecom's AIDC revenue rose 9.3% and intelligent computing revenue jumped 95.0% in the same period.
Carrier compute scorecard (per Star Market Daily)
China Mobile 2027 plan: 500B+ yuan procurement, 100B+ yuan compute
China Mobile H1 2026: AIDC revenue +486.1%, intelligent computing +130.1%
China Unicom Q1-Q3 2026: compute revenue +12.2%, IDC revenue +10.4%
China Telecom H1 2026: intelligent computing +95.0%, AIDC +9.3%
Where does the money actually come back? Monetization is converging on tokens. A China Galaxy Securities research note dated November 5 argues that "AI factories" and "sovereign AI" are the two best monetization paths for carriers worldwide, and that China's three operators have pioneered a token-economy route on top of the national compute base. China Telecom proposed token operations in March, with its Xirang platform managing over 100EFLOPS. China Unicom built an intensive "three-in-one" token system, and China Mobile released its token operation system at the 2026 Mobile Cloud Conference, aiming to link "agents consuming tokens and tokens pulling compute."
The headline number, big as it is, matters less than the shift underneath. Total carrier capex is shrinking while the compute share keeps rising, and AI has effectively taken over from cloud as the growth engine. Once the hundred-billion-yuan compute budget lands, the biggest beneficiaries will be domestic AI servers along with the server, interconnect and storage supply chains. Brokers note carriers prioritize domestic compute servers, which is moving the ecosystem from filling gaps to building a self-reliant stack. Carrier procurement is now among the largest single order sources for domestic compute.