Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, claims that AI token usage has grown by a factor of one million over the past six years. That alone would be a staggering number. But here’s the thing: he expects it to happen again.
The math behind the madness
Altman’s projection isn’t pulled entirely from thin air. Industry expert David Sacks has broken down where these exponential gains might come from: roughly 100x improvements in AI model algorithms, another 100x from advances in hardware like chips, and yet another 100x from raw compute power. Multiply those together and you get a million-fold increase in capability from those three vectors alone.
The real-world data supports the trajectory, even if it hasn’t yet reached Altman’s full vision. Google reported a 14-fold increase in AI token usage over just eight months during the 2024-2025 period.
OpenAI’s own ecosystem tells a similar story. Engineers and projects tied to OpenAI have reportedly processed between 100 billion and 600 billion tokens in a single month. One notable project racked up $1.3 million in API usage costs alone.
