One hundred billion tokens per month. That’s how much OpenAI’s single biggest API customer is burning through, according to CEO Sam Altman. To put that in perspective, a single token is roughly three-quarters of a word. So we’re talking about the equivalent of approximately 75 billion words generated monthly by just one organization.
And here’s the kicker: Altman says that customer isn’t even the world’s highest consumer of AI tokens. Someone, somewhere, is using even more.
The scale of AI consumption is getting absurd
OpenAI now issues physical plaques, which it calls “Tokens of Appreciation,” to organizations that hit specific consumption milestones. The thresholds are 10 billion, 100 billion, and 1 trillion tokens used through its API.
McKinsey & Company, the consulting giant, recently celebrated crossing the 100 billion token threshold.
