20–100x token growth projected
Lin Qiao projects Fireworks' token throughput could grow 20x to 100x by end of next year as AI adoption accelerates.
Snapshot · The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks
Explore episode
Jul 20, 2026
Where this was said
How Much Will AI Token Usage Explode Over the Next Two Years?
At 37:17 · chapter starts 37:00
Harry opens with the customer concentration question — can Fireworks survive a Cursor churn given a potential SpaceX acquisition? Lin pivots to the broader portfolio: 2024 was the year of coding, 2025 is the year of co-work, and co-work customers span legal, finance, healthcare, consumer-facing recommendation systems, and beyond. He then drops a striking operational disclosure: Fireworks processes more than 40 trillion tokens per day, the majority from customised models. When Harry asks where that number goes in a year, Lin offers a range of 20x to 100x — and argues that at those growth rates, the idea that AI CapEx is in a bubble is simply wrong. The world is bottlenecked by physical supply chains, not by lack of demand.
Cursor grew 1,000x in 2 years
Cursor, an early Fireworks customer when it was a single-digit-million company, grew approximately 1,000x over two years.
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