Box and Nvidia Warn of Soaring AI Token Costs

The CEO of Box, Aaron Levie, recently emphasized the growing importance of AI tokens for businesses, stating that their consumption will not be limited to engineers. According to Levie, the use of AI tokens will increase among workers who effectively leverage these technologies. He specified that tech companies will not be the only ones to see their AI budgets explode.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, expressed his discontent at the idea that an engineer would not spend the equivalent of half their salary on tokens. Levie asserted that tech companies will not be the last to see their AI budgets soar. "It will of course start with engineering, where we already know that developers can run multiple agents in parallel or have projects going on all night," Levie wrote on X. "But it will ultimately touch the rest of knowledge work as well."

The legal sector and sales are cited by Levie as areas likely to become heavy users of tokens. Tokens determine how AI is measured and how its consumption is priced. They are units of text, a word or part of a word—essentially the building blocks of Large Language Models, which power popular chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, or xAI's Grok. It is important to note that tokens are not a fixed rate, and AI companies tend to charge more for the use of the most advanced models and for more complex queries.

Levie's post followed Huang's assertion that he would be "deeply alarmed" if an engineer earning $500,000 did not spend at least half of that salary on tokens. "This $500,000 engineer, at the end of the year, I'm going to ask them how much they spent on tokens. If that person says $5,000, I'm going to go crazy," Huang said during an episode of the "All-In Podcast" released on Thursday.

Levie added that "this underlying concept and trend are going to become very real, as workers who properly leverage AI will only consume more of it." "Their computing budgets will simply increase monotonically over time," he wrote.

However, it will not only be workers who are affected, Levie clarified. Agents, which can operate at any hour, are likely to be the biggest consumers of tokens. "These are not chatbot workflows answering a simple question, but agents that operate and process huge amounts of data at scale, generating new forms of information," he wrote.

Not everyone will be thrilled with their AI computing budget. Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya stated that he had to tell his software company, 8090, to stop using Cursor, a popular AI coding tool, after realizing how much the company was spending on tokens. "Our costs have more than tripled since November 2025," Palihapitiya said during a previous episode of the "All-In Podcast." "Between the inference cost we pay to AWS, which is huge, and our costs with Cursor and Anthropic, we are just spending millions."

Levie concluded by saying that companies "will need to determine how they budget for this." "This will likely not be an IT budget line item over time, but ultimately owned and allocated by the business," he wrote. "Perhaps the CFO is ultimately the one responsible for AI :-)."