OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company's top token user is going through 100 billion tokens per month.Why it matters: As people inside and out of AI labs are spending more and more on tokens, Altman acknowledges that cost concerns have become a "huge issue." What they're saying: "The token leader at Open AI uses about 100 billion tokens a month. To my embarrassment, that's not the token leader in the world. We found someone that used even more," Altman said on a livestream about OpenAI's enterprise adoption. The number is staggering when put into context: Over six years ago, the top token user at OpenAI blew through about 100,000 tokens per month, Altman said.That's a 1 million-fold increase in token usage.Altman said OpenAI has a customer using even more tokens per month than the AI lab's top internal user.Between the lines: AI demand is exploding. That's especially true given the tokenmaxxing culture that's led to things like internal token leader boards, or measurements of how many AI tokens employees are burning through. While that could sound like a positive for AI labs that benefit from token spend, the boom in demand also highlights "the infrastructure challenge ahead of us," Altman said. Compute constraints can prevent AI labs from being able to service all the inbound demand they're receiving, putting a ceiling on potential revenue growth. Zoom out: Altman has talked about the AI costs problem several times this week.He said cost concerns are the second-most common issue he hears about from customers behind simplifying AI workflows. Costs never came up" before but is now "all of a sudden a huge issue.""We want you all to be able to use AI and never worry about it being great and affordable," he added.Follow the money: Figuring that out how to make AI cheaper will be especially important given what Altman said is coming next from OpenAI: "constant running proactive AI." "If there's one thing to get ready for as the next phase over the next year, this is the one I would pick," Altman said, adding this will change how companies plan around AI usage and security. Autonomous AI that runs without being prompted can get expensive quickly. Just ask the CFO that accidentally oversaw a $500 million IT bill in one month. What we're watching: How OpenAI handles the corporate cost reckoning.Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI in corporate spending, per Ramp data.If OpenAI can successfully meet enterprise demand for cheaper AI usage, it could allow them to take market share from their biggest competitor right before both AI labs are expected to go public.