token

A token is a number between 0 and about 65,000 standing for a few letters, pixels or a sound: roughly one syllable, with a hundred tokens covering a line of code. Four sources dated between February and June 2026 treat it as an accounting unit rather than a technical one.

The FinOps Foundation's guide FinOps for AI Overview (17 February 2026) starts from the token as the fundamental unit of generative AI consumption and derives its KPIs from it: cost per token, cost per inference, and a model-choice score comparing the MMLU a task actually requires against the MMLU of the model running it. Arthur Mensch supplies the physical version in his 13 May 2026 testimony to the Assemblée nationale: electricity is turned into intelligence, into token generation. One gigawatt of datacenter costs 50 Md$ over five years and produces 20 Md$ of tokens a year. On that chain he places roughly 10% of the value in the electron and 90% elsewhere.

Olivier Rafal calls the token "la nouvelle unité de mesure des dépenses technologiques" after the Linux Foundation and the FinOps Foundation launched the Tokenomics Foundation on 3 June 2026, citing Goldman Sachs on global usage multiplying by 24 by 2030 to reach 120 million billion tokens per month. Philippe Ensarguet reads the same displacement from the seller's side: the billable hour is losing its status as the unit of economic value.

Rafal's unresolved point is comparability. Input tokens, cache systems and output tokens are priced on incompatible terms from one model to the next.