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+73.1B per minute · since 00:00 UTC
This is a live, continuously changing estimate. It isn't printed here because a figure on paper would be wrong the moment you read it — see the current value at https://earthnow.app/signal/ai-tokens-processed-today.
Estimated, not measured
Every token has a physical cost: electricity, water for cooling, and hardware that was mined and will be discarded. AI's footprint is a data-centre footprint, and it is growing faster than the grid is decarbonising.
Estimated tokens processed by large language models since midnight UTC. A token is roughly three quarters of a word.
Nobody counts this as it happens. EarthNow takes a published figure for the whole day, divides it by the 86,400 seconds in a day, and multiplies by the seconds elapsed since midnight UTC. So the value climbs smoothly and is the right order of magnitude — but the smoothness is arithmetic, not observation. Nothing happening in the world is being watched in real time.
value = daily total ÷ 86,400 × seconds since 00:00 UTC
A consequence worth knowing: the counter resets at midnight UTC, not at your midnight. And because the figure advances at a constant rate, this page cannot tell you whether today is unusual. For that you need a measurement.
A floor, not a total: Google alone reported 3.2 quadrillion tokens a month at I/O 2026, seven times its 2025 figure.
The figure is theirs; the running total is ours. Cite them for the number, and EarthNow for what it looks like as it accumulates.
Citation