Global inference may hit 10 quadrillion tokens a month, mostly unread
johnowhitaker · x · 2026-08-19
Developer John Whitaker tries to grasp the scale of global inference: Codex alone consumed 40 trillion tokens in roughly 3 weeks since launch. That works out to 20M tokens per second, or 800k tokens per developer across 50M developers — while he personally writes under 1M tokens a year, meaning a million lifetimes of writing.
He guesses global inference is now around 10 quadrillion tokens per month, and wonders what fraction of those tokens are ever actually read.
Related event: Global AI inference estimated at ~10 quadrillion tokens per month(2 posts)→
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