As AI industry booms, Lin Qiao, CEO of $4 billion startup processing 15 trillion AI tokens a day, calls 2026 the year of …
The global AI industry is increasing and very few people embody that momentum more than Lin Qiao, CEO of Fireworks AI, a $4 billion startup now processing 15 trillion AI tokens per day. As reported by Business Insider, a former Meta engineer who helped build PyTorch, Qiao has seen firsthand how quickly AI can move from experimental frameworks to mainstream adoption. “This is the year token consumption is going to grow exponentially,” she said in a recent interview.
Fireworks AI’s inference cloud platform has now scaled rapidly from 10 trillion tokens in late 2025 to 13 trillion earlier this year, and now 15 trillion daily. Tokens, the basic units AI models use to process language, are not just powering tech teams.
