OpenRouter burns 172T tokens a week, Chinese models take half, DeepSeek leads
vista8 · x · 2026-10-15
A weekly snapshot of OpenRouter usage (Oct 5–11): 172 trillion tokens processed globally, up 3.6% week-over-week. Chinese models accounted for 86.74T tokens vs 18.97T for US models — Chinese models have outranked US ones for 24 straight weeks.
The top five are all Chinese Flash-tier or preview models:
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: 41T (+60%), over 3x the runner-up despite an August price hike
- Zhipu GLM 5.3 Flash: 12.2T (+26%)
- Xiaomi MiMo-V2.6-Flash: 11.5T (+19%)
- StepFun Step 5 Preview: 8.84T
- Tencent Hy4 preview: 8.28T (+27%)
The author's take: volume concentrates in the "cheap and good enough" tier, echoing The Innovator's Dilemma — frontier models serve the high end while cheaper models capture the global mass market. Caveat: this reflects only OpenRouter traffic, not global usage. Also noted: V4.1 Flash has a free entry via OpenCode and credits were issued after an API outage.
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