Our chart this week is from Goldman Sachs’ recent research on the AI infrastructure build-out. It shows their baseline projection for global token consumption rising 24x above today’s capacity by 2030, driven largely by enterprise and consumer agents coming online from mid-2026 onwards.
This 24x number, based on current industry projections, looks remarkably low from where we sit. Over the last six months, agentic tasks that were previously economically viable have moved from tens or hundreds of thousands of tokens per run to hundreds of millions. ExoBrain consultants are burning around a billion tokens each per month, and if this were to be scaled up to the world’s knowledge workers, the demand would be orders of magnitude higher than Goldman models.
Nonetheless, Goldman’s report is worth reading. The report rightly identifies the real battleground as the physical and institutional constraints on the build-out, chip obsolescence cycles, data centre design churn, power queues, permitting, specialised labour and component supply shocks. If these constraints are overcome, the demand will be there.