For the last century, oil has helped run the world. Countries that could produce it cheaply gained enormous economic and geopolitical power.

AI may be creating a digital version of the same thing: tokens.

A token is essentially a small unit of AI output. Tokens are produced and consumed each time we engage with AI – every question we ask, piece of software it writes, image it creates, or task an agent completes. As AI becomes embedded throughout the economy, the number of tokens the world consumes could become enormous.

And the growth is staggering. Google says the number of tokens processed across its AI platforms has gone from just 9.7 trillion per month two years ago to more than 3.2 quadrillion today – an increase of more than 300x. More recently, Google's API token usage jumped from 16 billion tokens per minute in Q1 to 22 billion in Q2, an increase of nearly 40% in just three months.

If tokens are becoming the fuel of the AI economy, we are consuming a lot more fuel (and very quickly).
This changes the way we should think about data centres. They aren't simply warehouses full of computers anymore, they are becoming factories that turn electricity, chips, and data into intelligence. Their output is tokens.

That's where the comparison with oil gets interesting.

Oil-producing countries became powerful because the world needed what they produced. In an AI-driven economy, countries with abundant electricity, computing infrastructure, and AI capacity may have a similar advantage. The winners may be the countries that can produce the greatest number of tokens at the lowest cost.

And just like oil, producing the commodity is only part of the opportunity. There is an entire supply chain behind it – power generation, natural gas, uranium, electrical equipment, semiconductors, networking, and data centres.

Oil powered the industrial economy. Tokens may power the intelligence economy. And increasingly, the race is about who can produce the most of them.

I have also included a piece from our CIBC Economics Team entitled “Monthly World Markets Report: The Buildout Behind the Boom”.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to give us a call at any time.

Have a great long weekend.

Milan