Google handled trillions of searches in 2025, but as AI-powered answers and chat-based discovery gain ground, the way people find information is clearly shifting. With ChatGPT alone processing an estimated 1.2 trillion prompts a year, and its popularity in the UK growing rapidly, its electricity usage sky-rockets…
Ahead of tomorrow’s Earth Day, we bring you a summary of countries with most ChatGPT users and a prompt to consider if all use is necessary.
ChatGPT electricity usage is fifty times more than a typical Google search
eHowever, 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 the United Kingdom is the 8th largest market for ChatGPT, with 2.7% of its visitors being from the country. With 900 million paying users and around 1.2 billion users globally every month, ChatGPT remains the most-used chatbot in 2026, while 32.4 million visitors come from the UK every month. According to our estimate, users in the United Kingdom ask ChatGPT approximately 86.8 million questions every day, which adds up to 31.7 billion prompts per year.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.
These are the countries with the largest share of ChatGPT users in 2026:
number of monthly, non-unique visitors to ChatGPT.com
- United States: 205.2 million users, 17.10% of all
- India: 198 million users, 16.50% of all
- Brazil: 69.6 million users, 5.80% of all
- Canada: 64.8 million users, 5.40% of all
- France: 51.6 million users, 4.30% of all
- Spain: 44.4 million users, 3.70% of all
- Mexico: 43.2 million users, 3.60% of all
- United Kingdom: 32.4 million users, 2.70% of all
- Italy: 30 million users, 2.50% of all
- Philippines: 30 million users, 2.50% of all
- Germany: 28.8 million users, 2.40% of all
- Australia: 21.6 million users, 1.80% of all
- Colombia: 19.2 million users, 1.60% of all
- Argentina: 15.6 million users, 1.30% of all
- Netherlands: 13.2 million users, 1.10% of all
- South Korea: 13.2 million users, 1.10% of all
Nearly half of the UK population uses ChatGPT adding
In the United Kingdom, ChatGPT usage has reached a massive scale, with users generating around 86,785,714 prompts per day – or roughly 31.7 billion annually. This is based on April 2026 figures, showing that the UK accounts for 2.7% 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 nearly half (46.3%) of the population in the UK uses ChatGPT, a staggering 32.4 million people. However, ‘monthly visitors’ is not equal to ‘unique visitors’; by the end of 2025, the number of unique visitors from the UK reached 19.1 million, according to figures by DataReportal. With 247 million visits on average a month, the ChatGPT website was the 7th most visited website in the country last year.
The only websites more popular than ChatGPT in the UK are Google (2.97 bn visits/month), YouTube (1.03 bn visits/month), BBC (500 million visits/month), Facebook (462 million visits/month), Amazon (322 million visits/month), and Reddit (295 million visits/month).
What does ChatGPT’s popularity look like for electricity useage?
To handle the 86.8 million daily ChatGPT prompts from the UK, the company uses an estimated 1.64 million kW of electricity. Over the course of a year, this adds to nearly 599 GWh, which a large nuclear power plant would need 20 to 30 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 $8.3 million (£6.1 million).
‘The United Kingdom is quickly emerging as one of the most active markets for AI adoption, with tens of millions of users now integrating tools like ChatGPT into their daily routines. The sheer volume – nearly 87 million prompts a day – suggests that AI is no longer a niche tool, but a mainstream layer in how people search, work, and communicate.
What’s particularly striking is how this usage translates into platform relevance. With around 247 million monthly visits, ChatGPT has already become the 7th most visited website in the UK, sitting just behind digital heavyweights like Google, YouTube, and BBC. That puts it firmly in the top tier of online destinations, ahead of platforms that have been embedded in users’ habits for over a decade.’ – comments Alan Goldberg, from BestBrokers.com.
For this report, the researchers 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. But our hunger for effortless answers and content comes with a huge cost to the planet…
More about the electricity usage of ChatGPT prompts
Will you take a break from ChatGPT on today’s Earth Day (22 April) to give our Earth a breather?
While the consumption of electricity ranges dramatically between specific models, the current iteration, GPT-5, is significantly more powerful, efficient, and power-hungry than previous models. According to researchers at the University of Rhode Island’s AI lab, ChatGPT-5, which launched on August 7, 2025, consumes anywhere between 2 and 45 watts per medium-length prompt, averaging around 18.9 Wh. The research suggests that the new model could be much more electricity-demanding than its predecessor, up to 8 times more, in fact. This also applies to the model’s latest iterations, namely GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.4 Pro (the most token-efficient reasoning models so far, according to OpenAI), which were released on March 5, 2026.
This is over fifty times more than the energy needed for a typical Google search, which consumes about 0.3 watt-hours per query, according to The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). People are increasingly using AI chatbots such as ChatGPT to seek information online, with recent findings from a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper suggesting this is the most common use for ChatGPT right now. Data shows 19.3% of user conversations with the app can be categorised as ‘getting information’; close to half of all messages (45.2%) fall under the description of ‘use and manipulation’ of information.
Concerns about cybersecurity risks are also rising due to increased use of ChatGPT.
