OpenRouter's weekly token processing volume surged from approximately 5 trillion in early January to nearly 69 trillion in early August, a more than tenfold increase in about seven months, translating to a monthly compound growth rate of approximately 45%. Among these, open-weighted models from Chinese companies such as DeepSeek, Xiaomi, Tencent, and MiniMax accounted for over 60%, indicating that demand is not solely concentrated on a few high-priced, closed-source models: cutting-edge models handle complex inference, while low-cost models are rapidly expanding in programming, agent processing, and batch tasks.
Note: OpenRouter is merely an aggregation platform; usage growth is also influenced by platform market share increases, model price reductions, longer context times, and repeated agent calls. Furthermore, the number of tokens does not directly correlate with computational load and revenue; caching, MoE architecture, and inference efficiency can all reduce unit costs.
