Google AI usage smashes past a Quadrillion tokens in a month

By Matthew Griffin Intelligence and the Senses 25th October 2025

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

AI use is exploding – when you look at Token use – but there’s more to the story than just giant numbers.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to take off around the world and Google this week announced that it processed nearly a quadrillion tokens across its AI services. Tokens are units of data processed by AI models during training and inference, giving some context into the scale of the usage of Google services. Tokens can be made up of text, images, audio clips, videos, or another modality.

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In an OpenAI blog post, the rival Generative AI company said that one token was usually equivalent to four characters in English, while one paragraph usually meant around 100 tokens. The transcript of the US Declaration of Independence contains 1,695 tokens.

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“We processed almost 1,000,000,000,000,000 tokens last month, more than double the amount from May,” Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said on X.

The increase in tokens processed may not necessarily mean a doubling in usage, but more that reasoning models process significantly more tokens per use. Google began rolling out a family of Gemini 2.5 reasoning models from the end of March.

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Increasing the number of tokens processed requires an increase in data center infrastructure. This month, Google said that it expected data center capex for the year to increase by $10 billion to $85bn.

“With compute, there’s the amount of compute you have for training, often it needs to be colocated – so actually even bandwidth constraints between data centers can affect that,” Hassabis said on the Lex Fridman podcast.

“But because now AI systems are in products being used by billions of people around the world, you need a ton of inference compute now. And then on top of that, there’s the thinking systems – the new paradigm of the last year – where they get smarter the longer amount of inference time you give them at test time.

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“So all of those things need a lot of compute, and I don’t really see that slowing down. And as AI systems become better, they’ll become more useful and there’ll be more demand for them.”

Matthew Griffin / About Author

Described by NASA as a "Walking Encyclopaedia of the Future" and one of the world’s most in demand keynote speakers Matthew Griffin, Founder and Futurist in Chief of the 311 Institute, a global Futures and Deep Futures advisory firm, is a multi-award winning Futurist and strategic foresight expert, author, lecturer, mentor, podcast and YouTube host.

With a distinguished career running global business units at Atos, EMC, and IBM today Matthew helps leaders and titans of industry from all over the world explore the impact of the inter sections of technology, culture, and leadership, then helps them create high performance organisations that can continuously disrupt, outpace, and outthink their competition.

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