Chinese Models Now Process More Tokens Than American Ones. The Price War Has Begun.

140 trillion. China’s daily AI token usage, March 2026. Up from 100 billion in early 2024. 1,000-fold in two years. On OpenRouter: 61% of top-ten token consumption is Chinese models.

I sat through HumanX panels on “open vs. closed models” without once hearing that the Chinese open-source ecosystem already won the volume game.