If you follow the computing infrastructure industry, you will hear three words repeatedly this year: bits, watts and tokens. What do they actually mean? Here is the simple version.
Bits: The Building Blocks of Compute
A bit is the smallest unit of information in computing — a 0 or a 1. But in the context of computing infrastructure, “bits” stand for all the hardware that creates, processes and moves those zeros and ones.
Put more directly: computing power does not appear out of nowhere. It is built from physical hardware, one component at a time. AI chips do the computing — NVIDIA GPUs and Huawei Ascend accelerators, for example. Servers package hundreds of chips into systems that work together. Network equipment moves data back and forth between them. Cooling and power-distribution systems remove heat and keep everything supplied with electricity.
Those are the “bits” — the bricks and steel of the compute building. Without them, no large model or AI application can run.
The Computing Facilities & Equipment zone in the Level 2 AIDC Hall at DITExpo 2026 is where those building blocks will be on display. From chips and servers to liquid-cooling systems, you can see what goes into constructing the compute infrastructure stack.
Watts: The Fuel for Compute
A watt is a unit of power — the rate at which energy is consumed. In computing, “watts” answer a simple question: what powers all that compute? Electricity.
That question has become impossible to ignore over the past two years. A fully loaded AI server cluster can consume several megawatts, while a 10,000-accelerator cluster may use as much electricity as a small city. More importantly, AI training is not a workload that runs briefly and shuts down. It can continue at full load for months.
So the fundamental question of computing power has become an electricity question. And increasingly, it is not just any electricity — it is green electricity. Following the 2025 window-guidance measures, new data centers are required to specify their renewable-power share. Horinger, Inner Mongolia, requires at least 80% green electricity. Watts are no longer just a technical specification for a data center. They can determine whether a project is approved, whether it can be built, and whether it can operate competitively.
The Computing-Power Coordination zone in DITExpo 2026’s Level 2 AIDC Hall showcases this “fuel system.” The companies there are not peripheral suppliers to data centers; they sit at the very first link of the computing infrastructure value chain.
Tokens: The Product of Compute
A token originally means a “token” or unit. In AI, it refers to the smallest unit a large language model processes when handling text. One token is roughly equivalent to 0.75 Chinese characters. API calls are billed by token, and model-training datasets are also measured in tokens.
At DITExpo 2026, however, “Token” carries a broader meaning: computing power is becoming not just infrastructure, but a tradable commodity. Think of oil — someone extracts it by building data centers, someone refines it through AI training, someone trades it through compute scheduling and pricing, and someone runs the service station by delivering AI applications.
The term “Token Factory” refers to the emerging distributed networks for trading computing resources. Render Network uses blockchain to connect idle GPUs around the world for rendering. Akash operates a decentralized cloud-computing marketplace. Golem enables peer-to-peer compute rental. They are all pursuing the same idea: turn computing power into a resource that can be traded freely and purchased on demand, rather than forcing every user to build capital-intensive infrastructure of their own.
That fits the broader trend toward “using compute like electricity.” Computing-power banks, scheduling platforms and compute marketplaces are all emerging around the same concept: Token becomes the monetized output of computing power.
The Token Factory zone in DITExpo 2026’s Level 2 AIDC Hall is where these “refineries and exchanges” come together — companies trading compute, running distributed scheduling systems, and using Web3+AI to rethink the ownership and use of computing resources.
Putting the Three Together
Bits are the building blocks — the hardware. Watts are the fuel — the electricity. Tokens are the product — the tradable output of computing. Using a construction analogy, bits determine how high the building can rise, watts determine whether the furnace can keep running, and tokens determine the value of what the building produces.
From “East Data, West Computing” to “East Data, West Training” and then toward computing as a utility, the same chain keeps extending: first build the bits and create the computing capacity; then connect the watts and secure the green electricity; finally circulate the tokens and trade the compute. DITExpo 2026 brings every link in that chain together on one show floor.
December 10–11, Shougang Park, Beijing. Want to see what bits, watts and tokens look like in the real world? Come and see them for yourself.
