Tenfold in One Year: OpenRouter Token's Annual Burn Surpasses Trillions, with an Annualized Value of Around $1 Billion

According to 1M AI News monitoring, the annualized Token throughput of the AI model API aggregation platform OpenRouter has surpassed 1 quadrillion (10^15, i.e., 1 quadrillion), with a weekly throughput of 20.47 trillion Tokens. OpenRouter investor and Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das disclosed this data on X, estimating that, based on an average price of approximately $1 per million Tokens, the Token consumption routed through OpenRouter corresponds to an annual expenditure of about $10 billion.

OpenRouter's usage chart shows that its weekly Token throughput has grown from around 2 trillion in March 2025 to over 20 trillion in March 2026, representing a tenfold increase within a year. As of the week ending March 16th, the highest-usage models were, in order, the mysterious model Hunter Alpha (500 billion Tokens per week), MiniMax M2.5 (448 billion), Starlight Step 3.5 Flash (337 billion), Claude Sonnet 4.6 (308 billion), DeepSeek V3.2 (301 billion), Claude Opus 4.6 (275 billion), and Gemini 3 Flash Preview (272 billion).

OpenRouter was founded by OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah, and in June 2025, it announced the completion of a $40 million financing (including seed and Series A rounds), with Menlo Ventures leading the Series A and Sequoia Capital participating.