Tokens Are the New Oil

Dear {{First_Name|Friend}},

We're back this week with a new essay on the Mavka Substack, where you’ll find long-form analysis and deeper research on the specific sectors we cover.

This week's piece is “Tokens Are the New Oil,” where we look at the American AI price problem nobody is talking about.

The token is a commodity that shouldn’t feel unfamiliar as the smallest unit of AI thought at roughly three-quarters of a word, and the recurring cost that determines which businesses are viable. Oil built the twentieth century. Tokens are building this one. And right now, the United States is losing the price war badly — Chinese models now capture 61% of developer usage on OpenRouter, scoring near-equivalently to American frontier models at 10 to 20 times lower cost, a gap engineered by the very sanctions meant to slow them down.

This is the token price gap and it has two inputs: efficient algorithms China was forced to invent, and cheap electricity America chose not to build. Fossil fuel campaign dollars gutted the clean energy credits that could have closed it. Every month that gap widens, the next generation of founders quietly routes their apps to a Chinese endpoint instead.

Read more below, where we explore the full token cost equation, the gaps driving it, and what it means for founders deciding which model to build on.

Stay sharp,