By Alistair Barr
Publication Date: 2026-06-12 09:01:00
I had lunch with the CEO of an AI infrastructure company recently. I can’t tell you their name, but they said something that really caught my attention: There will be a crop of new AI models later this year that will be a lot better and more efficient.
This will likely make AI tokens more abundant and radically cheaper. (Tokens are the basic units models use to process information, and the standard way AI use is measured and priced).
Hand-wringing about tokenmaxxing could die down. Or, users could go on another bender and burn even more tokens with abandon.
Either way, the price of tokens is probably about to plummet. This is why we already see some AI model providers slashing prices, and other players talking about doing so.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said AI costs had become a huge issue, adding that the startup will have “a lot of ways we can help people get more value for less spend.”
This trend may already be showing up in the data. A closely watched token spending index run by Silicon Data peaked at around 2.06 in late May and fell to 1.75 as of June 10.
Carmen Li, the CEO of Silicon Data, told me this could mean token prices are dropping across many AI models.
Blackwell finally emerges
The main force driving token prices lower is a new wave of technology that’s sweeping through AI data centers.
Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs are being installed in huge…
