BestBrokers.com

As concerns about the potential slowing down of business for ChatGPT have been sinking the stocks of companies working with OpenAI, the platform remains the most popular AI tool. To provide details about its usage around the world and in Australia, in particular, I am reaching out with our recent report that looks into the popularity of the chatbot and the massive amount of user prompts it processes every day.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT remains the most widely used conversational AI model, with 900 million weekly active users and an estimated 22.5 billion user queries per week or around 1.17 trillion queries a year. However, all this comes with a massive use of electricity, so to discover the power demands of AI, the team at BestBrokers set out to estimate the number of prompts the popular chatbot processes every day, with an approximate usage breakdown by country as of April 2026. Moreover, we calculated the electricity consumption for all this, with all the data available on Google Drive via this link.

Calculations show that with 900 million paying users and around 1.2 billion users globally every month, ChatGPT remains the most-used chatbot in 2026. Its website is the 6th most visited website in Australia, being opened an average of 111 million times each month. Moreover, the AI chatbot attracts millions of Aussie users, who send nearly 58 million queries a day or an average of 21.1 billion queries every year. To process the prompts from Australia alone, ChatGPT consumes an estimated 1.1 gigawatt-hours of electricity every single day.

Other highlights from the report:

• In Australia, ChatGPT’s web usage has reached a massive scale, with users generating 57.86 million prompts per day – or roughly 21.1 billion annually. This is based on April 2026 figures, showing that Australia accounts for 1.8% of all traffic to the ChatGPT website, and each month, the chatbot is used by an estimated 1.2 billion people globally.
• These numbers would suggest that more than three-quarters of Australia’s population (or around 79.3%) uses ChatGPT, a staggering 21.6 million people. However, ‘monthly visitors’ is not equal to ‘unique visitors’; by the end of 2025, the number of unique visitors from Australia reached 8.03 million, according to figures by DataReportal. With 111 million visits on average a month, the ChatGPT website was the 6th most-visited website in the country last year.
• The most popular websites in Australia are Google (1.39 billion visits/month), YouTube (504 million visits/month), and Facebook (219 million visits/month). ChatGPT, the 6th most popular platform in the country, beats well-established Internet giants such as Wikipedia and Bing, as well as the country’s two leading news publications, ABC News (56 million visits/month) and news.com.au (53.1 million visits/month).
• To handle the nearly 58 million daily ChatGPT prompts from Australia, the company uses an estimated 1.09 GW of electricity. Over the course of a year, this adds to a little over 399 GWh, which a large nuclear power plant would need 100 days to produce.
• On a global level, the numbers become even more striking. Users around the world send more than 1.17 trillion prompts annually, requiring over 22 billion kWh of electricity to process, placing AI infrastructure firmly in the category of large-scale energy consumers. If OpenAI sourced all this power directly from the grid in the United States, the daily cost of running ChatGPT at current usage levels would exceed US$8.3 million.

‘In Australia, ChatGPT has gone from something people tried out of curiosity to something many now use almost by default. With nearly 58 million prompts generated each day and more than a hundred monthly visits, it has climbed to become the 6th most-visited website in the country, even outperforming platforms like Wikipedia and major news outlets. While the headline figures suggest usage close to 80% of the population, the reality is more nuanced, with around 8 million unique users driving a high level of repeat engagement. What stands out is not just how widely it’s used, but how quickly it has become part of everyday habits, from quick questions to more complex tasks. That level of reliance, however, comes with a growing trade-off, as the energy needed to support this activity places AI systems firmly in the category of large-scale industrial consumption.’

– comments Alan Goldberg, from BestBrokers.com.

For this report, we estimated the number of prompts ChatGPT processes every day. The estimate is based on publicly available user figures, average usage patterns, and assumptions about how frequently individuals interact with ChatGPT during a typical session. By combining these inputs, we approximated the total number of prompts generated globally on a daily basis and then projected that activity across a full year.

Additional information and estimates for the power consumption from ChatGPT’s processing of 3.2 billion daily queries are available in the full report. It also features detailed calculations, sources, and the complete methodology behind the findings, whereas the dataset we’ve created can be accessed on Google Drive via this link.

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