{"id":2304,"date":"2026-04-10T10:37:23","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T10:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/2304\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T10:37:23","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T10:37:23","slug":"visa-says-its-burning-through-almost-2-trillion-ai-tokens-per-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/2304\/","title":{"rendered":"Visa Says It’s Burning Through Almost 2 Trillion AI Tokens Per Month"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘Tokenmaxxing’ \u2014 or the controversial practice<\/a> of showing off how many AI tokens<\/a> you spend \u2014 is taking off outside Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n

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Visa, the world’s largest payments company, is spending 1.9 trillion tokens a month as of March \u2014 double the number it recorded in February of this year, the company told Business Insider.<\/p>\n

Visa says it’s not focused on mere output, but on actual results. It has started rewarding teams who prove they used AI to get things done faster.<\/p>\n

“It’s about the volume of impact,” Visa’s president of technology, Rajat Taneja, said.<\/p>\n

It’s the latest sign that large corporations are aggressively adopting AI internally, with JPMorgan tracking how heavily<\/a> its employees use AI and IKEA launching<\/a> an AI sidekick to help its staff brainstorm. Now, businesses are going beyond just tracking AI usage \u2014 they are also rewarding employees for it.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, the biggest token usage at Visa is taking place in its software engineering department<\/a>, Taneja said. But AI is taking off in other areas, too.<\/p>\n

For example, Visa’s marketing division used AI to spin up a new ad<\/a> showing skiers racing down sunbaked streets in the Amalfi Coast.<\/p>\n

Visa’s internal AI awards<\/p>\n

Visa has started recognizing teams that use AI to supercharge their work.<\/p>\n

One team that used Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet model<\/a> to ship a new API<\/a> in under 6 days won such an award. Teams can choose their own prizes, such as internal company ‘points’ that can be used to buy things like a coffee maker, Taneja said.<\/p>\n

Taneja said Visa employees use various chatbots, with Claude being\u00a0the most popular right now \u2014 though it often swaps places with OpenAI’s ChatGPT<\/a>. Google’s Gemini<\/a> is also a popular option internally, he noted.<\/p>\n

Visas says 89% of its employees are active AI users, and 44% are what it considers power users: that means averaging at least 25 prompts per day for 15 days a month.<\/p>\n

How much is a trillion tokens?<\/p>\n

The trillion-token milestone is a notable one for a company outside Silicon Valley. However, within AI-land, burning through that high a number has become routine.<\/p>\n

Meta employees burned through 60 trillion tokens in a month, according to a recent report in The Information.<\/p>\n

A single developer at AI coding startup Cognition also surpassed the one-trillion mark for all-time usage, according to a\u00a0photo<\/a>\u00a0he posted of an OpenAI certificate\u00a0he received for the distinction.<\/p>\n

Still, Visa’s token-touting shows that burning tokens is a flex that isn’t limited to frontier tech companies anymore.<\/p>\n

People working in different industries might want to take notice.<\/p>\n

“This shift is once-in-a-lifetime \u2014 bigger than any technology in the past,” Taneja said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"‘Tokenmaxxing’ \u2014 or the controversial practice of showing off how many AI tokens you spend \u2014 is taking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2305,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,2521,25,1329,532,2517,2515,1332,2520,157,2519,2514,2516,1161,2518,676],"class_list":{"0":"post-2304","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ai","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-usage","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-business-insider","12":"tag-company","13":"tag-day","14":"tag-employee","15":"tag-month","16":"tag-number","17":"tag-openai","18":"tag-place","19":"tag-rajat-taneja","20":"tag-rewarding-team","21":"tag-silicon-valley","22":"tag-token","23":"tag-visa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}