“Hey Chat, make a meal plan for a family of 5 for the week on a low budget.”
“Hey Chat, I want to learn to play the guitar, come up with a step-by-step plan to make it happen.”
“Hey Chat, help me with this math problem.”
“Hey Chat, create an itinerary for a 5-day trip to Paris.”
From meal planning to calculus, large language models have moved from technology innovations to everyday companions. They are now used as business partners, personal trainers, travel agents and anything in between.
ChatGPT, created by OpenAI based in San Francisco, was one of the first large language models available to the public and is still one of the most widely used in the industry. As of March 2026, ChatGPT holds 60.4% of the AI market share, according to a recent study conducted by BestBrokers.
The chatbot’s growth has been rapid, according to the study. In December 2024, OpenAI posted on X the large language model had 300 million weekly active users. That number doubled from the September 2023 figure CEO Sam Altman had reported.
By September 2025, that number climbed to 700 million. Projections for 2026 have both unpaid and subscription weekly users reaching 1 billion, researchers highlighted.
As AI usage rises, so does the question: How much energy is required to answer a trillion “Hey Chats”?
ChatGPT’s global influence
The United States is the largest market for ChatGPT, with more than 205 million total users, which is about 17% of the global total. India follows close behind with 198 million users, according to BestBrokers data shared with Deseret News. Brazil (69.6 million), Canada (64.8 million) and France (51.6 million) rounded out the top five.
While the U.S. has the most users, Canadians chat the most with the bot. While the country ranks fourth in total users, it leads in number of prompts per user. According to BestBroker’s research, Canadians send about 63.3 billion prompts every year, which averages out to around 130 messages per citizen.
According to the report, ChatGPT’s weekly active users have reached 900 million, as of March 2026. The number of those with a paid subscription has reached around 50 million.
Even with this boom in AI use, traditional search isn’t going away. Google Search still handles between 8 billion and 16.5 billion queries a day, although researchers highlighted some of those Google searches are those looking for the AI chatbot.
Is ChatGPT a professional? Not so much
The way people use AI is more personal than business related. Data shared by OpenAI in February indicated that the consumer version of ChatGPT is being used more for personal life tasks rather than professional, Alan Goldberg of BestBrokers observed.
“While millions have already built the chatbot and other AI tools into their daily workflows, the usage is apparently changing: people seem to rely more on rival AI apps and tools for work and prefer ChatGPT for their personal use,” he said.
The billion-dollar power bill
The use of AI comes at an expensive price. The researchers noted that one single prompt to ChatGPT requires around 18.9 watt-hours of energy. That is over 60 times more energy than a Google search.
BestBrokers stated if every user averages 25 prompts per week, ChatGPT handles more than 3.2 billion queries a day, or just over 1 trillion every year.
To put those numbers in perspective, ChatGPT’s annual energy consumption could:
- Power 2.11 million average U.S. homes for a full year.
- Charge every electric vehicle in the U.S. about 36 times.
- Fully charge 4.23 billion iPhones every day for a year.
- Supply electricity to the entire United States for nearly two days.
One hour of ChatGPT use consumes as much energy as 13.5 million hours of video streaming — that’s 1,535 years of Netflix, BestBrokers noted.
To find this information, researchers used multiple databases to estimate the number of queries ChatGPT handles every week and how much those operations cost.
A year’s worth of ChatGPT prompts uses more energy than the entire nation of Puerto Rico (18,720 gigawatt-hours) or Slovenia (14,310 gigawatt-hours), according to data from Ember Energy. On a daily basis, the bot consumes as much power as the nation of Croatia, researchers highlighted.
As one can imagine, the cost of that energy isn’t cheap. BestBrokers estimates OpenAI spends roughly $3.019 billion annually on electricity alone, a figure that is based on U.S. commercial rates.
However, that cost is not a burden to the company’s finances due to its revenue from paying subscribers. The researchers project OpenAI will bring in $15.8 billion this year from its 50 million paying subscribers, and that number is only expected to increase.