Token

Plain English. A token is the unit of text a model reads and writes — roughly three-quarters of a word, though it can be a word fragment, a single character or a piece of punctuation. Models don't see letters or words; they see tokens, and everything they process, generate and are billed for is counted in them.

Why it moves money. The token is the atomic unit of the whole AI economy. Usage is metered in tokens, so it is the denominator under dollars per million tokens and the output side of tokens per megawatt. Every efficiency gain, price war and capacity plan is ultimately a statement about tokens: how many a system can produce, how cheaply, and how many customers will consume.

What to watch. Total token throughput as the real demand signal. Headline model quality matters less to the profit-and-loss than how many tokens flow through a platform each day — and whether reasoning models, which spend far more tokens per answer, lift consumption faster than per-token prices fall.

From the signals. Fireworks alone served 40 trillion tokens a day, more than Google's or OpenAI's developer platforms. Kimi K3 thinks in dense code, and that is why its token demand goes up.