Kingsoft Cloud's stock plummeted 5.34% intraday on Thursday, extending a period of weakness for the cloud service provider.
The sharp decline follows news that China Telecom and China Mobile have officially launched trial Token-based subscription packages. This move signals a fundamental shift in operator billing models from the traditional traffic-based era to a Token pricing era, which is widely viewed as a paradigm shift from the bit economy to the intelligent economy. Under this new model, operator revenue becomes directly tied to AI model invocation frequency. The market is concerned that telecom operators, leveraging their cloud-network integration advantages and massive user bases exceeding one billion, are now directly entering the computing power and AI service distribution segments. This development potentially undermines the intermediary role of traditional cloud service and computing power leasing companies such as Kingsoft Cloud.
The broader Internet Services and Infrastructure sector faced pressure during the session, with several of Kingsoft Cloud's peers also trading lower.