Engineers at tech companies are spending as much as they can on AI tokens.gettyEarlier this month, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi gave a keynote to his entire engineering department. During the speech, he singled out one engineer, who had spent more than $7,000 in AI tokens — an atomic unit of data processing for an AI model to generate text — over a two-week period in January. Ghodsi’s intent wasn’t to chide the employee for overspending. Instead, it was quite the opposite.“We had everybody in engineering clap for him, and celebrate what he did,” Ghodsi tells Forbes. “I’m trying to get everybody to use this stuff.”The engineer used the tokens through Isaac, the company's internal coding tool, which pulls from several different AI models, including those from Anthropic and OpenAI, Ghodsi says. Databricks, the $134 billion-valued data infrastructure company, isn’t alone in its fervor to get its engineers to embrace AI. Over the past few months, as vibe-coding has exploded and AI-generated code has become more reliable, Silicon Valley has pushed its software developers to go all in. How to quantify it? By measuring the amount of money that engineers are spending in AI tokens (with the bill usually footed by employers). The idea is to max out AI budgets to supercharge productivity. Token prices vary. For cheaper models and basic tasks, they can typically cost a few cents per million tokens. For more complex computations and premium models, prices can spike to anywhere from $20 to more than $100 per million tokens. For example, with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, the AI giant’s latest flagship model, the company charges $25 per million “output” tokens — the text generated as a response to a user’s prompt. While many companies around the country are belt-tightening and laying off employees (even juggernauts like Meta), there are plenty of AI giants and startups crowing about how much money their staff is spending in tokens. At Alven, a startup with less than 10 employees that is building AI tools for real estate, the company says it spent $16,000 on tokens in February. “Next month, we’re aiming to spend $60k,” cofounder Julio-Cezar Scerbina wrote on LinkedIn last week. “I’m starting to believe the winners in any category will be the ones who spend the most tokens.” At Writer, the $1.9 billion-valued enterprise AI startup, even non-engineers are racking up billions of tokens used, its senior partnerships lead wrote last week. (The employee who topped the company’s leaderboard racked up almost 5.9 billion tokens.) “If that $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed.”