Here’s a number that’s hard to even conceptualize: 5 quintillion. That’s 5 followed by 18 zeros. And according to DigitalOcean CEO Paddy Srinivasan, that’s roughly how many AI inference tokens the world will chew through annually by 2030.
The driving force behind this projection isn’t humans chatting with chatbots. It’s AI agents talking to other AI agents, autonomously generating workloads that dwarf anything we’ve seen from the current generation of AI products. Srinivasan estimates that autonomous agents will account for approximately 70% of all tokens generated per year by the end of the decade.
The scale of what’s coming
To put Srinivasan’s prediction in context, consider the current baseline. Around 50 trillion inference tokens are processed daily right now. DigitalOcean’s projections suggest that number will balloon to over 500 trillion daily by 2030. That’s a tenfold increase in daily throughput, and it maps to the 4 to 5 quintillion annual figure.
Goldman Sachs appears to be singing from a similar hymn sheet. The investment bank’s May 2026 report forecasts a 24-fold increase in monthly token consumption, projecting it will reach 120 quadrillion tokens per month by 2030.
