At companies including Meta, Nvidia and Databricks, engineers are celebrated the more they spend to use AI. “This is easy money,” Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said. “No limit.”
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi gave a keynote to his entire engineering department. During the speech, he singled out one engineer, who had spent more than $7,000 in AI tokens — an atomic unit of data processing for an AI model to generate text — over a two-week period in January.
Ghodsi’s intent wasn’t to chide the employee for overspending. Instead, it was quite the opposite.. “I’m trying to get everybody to use this stuff.” The engineer used the tokens through Isaac, the company's internal coding tool, which pulls from several different AI models, including those from Anthropic and OpenAI, Ghodsi says. Databricks, the $134 billion-valued data infrastructure company, isn’t alone in its fervor to get its engineers to embrace AI. Over the past few months, as vibe-coding has exploded and AI-generated code has become more reliable, Silicon Valley has pushed its software developers to go all in. How to quantify it? By measuring the amount of money that engineers are spending in AI tokens . The idea is to max out AI budgets to supercharge productivity. Token prices vary. For cheaper models and basic tasks, they can typically cost a few cents per million tokens. For more complex computations and premium models, prices can spike to anywhere from $20 to more than $100 per million tokens. For example, with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, the AI giant’s latest flagship model, the company charges $25 per million “output” tokens — the text generated as a response to a user’s prompt. While many companies around the country are belt-tightening and laying off employees , there are plenty of AI giants and startups crowing about how much money their staff is spending in tokens. At Alven, a startup with less than 10 employees that is building AI tools for real estate, the company says it spent $16,000 on tokens in February. “Next month, we’re aiming to spend $60k,” cofounder Julio-Cezar Scerbinaon LinkedIn last week. “I’m starting to believe the winners in any category will be the ones who spend the most tokens.” At Writer, the $1.9 billion-valued enterprise AI startup, even non-engineers are racking up billions of tokens used, its senior partnerships leadlast week. “If that $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed.” At Sendbird, a startup that helps businesses like DoorDash and Redfin to chat with users for customer support, the company also keeps a running leaderboard for who spends the most in tokens. From there, top token spenders are given rankings, from “Beginner” to “AI God” — the latter defined as those using at least 100 million tokens a day, says CEO John Kim. The company has also built a portal to dole out prizes for employee token usage, including coffee gift cards or company swag. The startup eventually plans to add bigger perks, like earning extra vacation days. The goal is to maximize productivity by setting up autonomous AI agents to keep working while their engineers are asleep , Kim says. About 70% of the tokens are spent with Anthropic’s Claude Code, he says, while the remainder is spent with OpenAI’s Codex. The push for token usage is even more pronounced at big companies, where their billions of dollars in revenue can support a spending habit in overdrive. At Nvidia, valued at $4 trillion, CEO Jensen Huang says high-priced engineers better be maxing out their token spend. “That $500,000 engineer, at the end of the year, I’m going to ask him, ‘How much did you spend in tokens?’ If that person says ‘$5,000’ I will go ape-something else,” he said on the All-In podcast earlier this month. “If that $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed.” At a tech summit last month in San Francisco, which the NFL held ahead of the Super Bowl, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, widely known as Boz, also championed going big. He said his best engineer is spending his salary equivalent in tokens, but he’s “5x to 10x more productive.” “It’s like, this is easy money,” Bosworth said. “Keep doing it. No limit.” At Google, employees in some cases willThe explosion in token usage has led to a surge for the vibe coding services. Annualized revenue for Claude Code, widely seen as the leader in the space, has surged to $2.5 billion. OpenAI’s Codex has 1.6 million weekly active users. Cursor, long a darling of the space, saw its annualized revenue grow to more than $2 billion over the last three months, according to a source familiar with the company’s finances, and the company has been in “” to fend off threats like Anthropic. Smaller players like Cognition, Replit and Lovable have seen their valuations balloon as well. There’s a danger, of course, in blindly spending as much as you can on tokens. At Sendbird, eight out of the top 10 token spenders at any given time are usually mega-productive, says CEO Kim, while the rest may be more experimental. That’s okay, he says, because the gains will ultimately outweigh the misfires. It’s similar to the environment in the 1990s or early 2000s, when software engineers were judged by how many lines of code they wrote. “We’ve seen this movie before,” Kim says. The real indicator of productivity is how much of that AI-generated code makes it into production, he says, adding that token spending is not in itself a performance measurement.
Databricks Codex AI Meta Openai Anthropic Claude Code Nvidia Jensen Huang
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