FUZHOU, April 29 (Xinhua) -- China produced 52.26 zettabytes of data in 2025, an increase of 27.28 percent year on year, said Liu Liehong, head of the National Data Administration, on Wednesday.

Data generated by China's system software and artificial intelligence (AI) reached 26.92 zettabytes in 2025, overtaking the volume of traditionally dominant internet of things (IoT) data for the first time, Liu said at the opening of the 9th Digital China Summit in Fuzhou, east China's Fujian Province.

He also noted that the value added by the country's core digital economy industries accounted for more than 10.5 percent of GDP last year, and that digital infrastructure is being upgraded at an accelerating pace.

According to National Data Resource Survey Report (2025) released on Wednesday at the summit, in 2025, China's total data output accounts for approximately 27.44 percent of the global volume. Enterprises have become the primary driver of data production, contributing nearly 90 percent of incremental data output, underscoring the significant progress made in industrial digital and intelligent transformation.

Moreover, the national total data storage volume reached 2.53 zettabytes, a year-on-year increase of 21.05 percent, the report said.

It is worth noting that the report said China's total volume of data used for artificial intelligence (AI) training and inference in 2025 reached 199.48 exabytes, a year-on-year increase of 42.86 percent. The inference data volume hit 101.34 exabytes, surpassing training data volume for the first time.

"This marks that AI has entered a new stage featuring equal emphasis on training and inference as well as application-driven iteration," said Liu.

The average daily token calls nationwide has surged from over 1 trillion at the beginning of 2025 to 100 trillion at the year-end, showing an exponential growth. The annual cumulative token calls volume reached approximately 21,100 trillion times, Liu added. ■