Tracked inference volume hit 70.2 trillion tokens per week as of 2026-08-12, pushing the Token Demand Index to 298.4, up 64 percent over 30 days and 198 percent since 2026-05-06. The demand-weighted effective price is $1.20 per 1M tokens, while open-source models handle 69 percent of tracked traffic. That mix shows the market expanding through cheap, commoditized capacity rather than margins getting crushed across the board. It is the output-side companion to the Compute Tightness Index (the GPU input).
297.8Demand index (100 = 2026-05-06)
70.0TTokens / week
▲ +64%Demand, 30 days
69.2%Open-source share
$1.19Effective $/1M
$83.6MImplied spend/week*
As of 2026-08-13, tracked AI inference runs at 70.0T tokens/week — up +64% in 30 days and +198% since 2026-05-06. Open-source carries 69.2% of those tokens, holding the demand-weighted price near $1.19/1M — a fraction of frontier list prices even as frontier models themselves got pricier.
Built from OpenRouter's model rankings + pricing, grouped into Claude / OpenAI / Google / xAI / Open-source / Other. Token counts are OpenRouter's trailing-7-day figures (the rankings "week" view) — i.e. each point is tokens processed over the prior week, not a single day. Per group: blended median $/1M (75/25 input/output) and weekly total_tokens. Demand index = latest weekly total ÷ the first week's total × 100. Effective $/1M = demand-weighted blended price (as-of prices carried forward across snapshots where only one side updated). Series since 2026-05-06; it grows as new snapshots land. Full history as CSV. Coverage is OpenRouter traffic — a large but partial slice of the market.
Pair it with the Compute Tightness Index (GPU input) for both sides of the AI-compute economy. Query the raw data from an agent via the Bargo MCP endpoint (get_inference_economics).