According to The Rundown AI on X, Sam Altman told the BlackRock U.S. Infrastructure Summit that OpenAI and other model providers will fundamentally monetize by “selling tokens,” framing inference usage as the core revenue unit and noting competitors may invest tens of millions to billions to match capability (source: The Rundown AI). As reported by The Rundown AI, this token-based model implies scale advantages for foundation model operators with optimized inference stacks, large-scale GPU capacity, and power-secure data centers, shaping pricing strategies around context length, latency tiers, and fine-tune throughput. According to The Rundown AI, enterprises should evaluate total cost of ownership across model quality per token, rate limits, and dedicated capacity contracts, while infrastructure investors can target GPU clusters, power procurement, and cooling to capture rising inference demand. As reported by The Rundown AI, Altman’s remarks underscore a shift from “model releases” to “usage economies,” where unit economics depend on tokens per task, hardware efficiency, and long-context workload mix.