The telephone needed more than a century to put a billion lines on Earth. The internet did it in fourteen years. TikTok did it in five. Each new communications technology inherits the wires, the handsets and the habits laid down by the last one — so the climb to a billion keeps getting shorter. Here is that acceleration, measured.
OpenAI released ChatGPT on 30 Nov 2022. By 27 Feb 2026 the company reported 900 million weekly active users — a pace no consumer technology has matched. Fixed telephone lines took roughly 126 years to pass a billion.
One bar per technology, drawn to the same scale. The telephone's bar is the whole width of the page; ChatGPT's is a sliver at the bottom.
Metrics differ by necessity: telephone and mobile are subscriptions; internet is users; the platforms are monthly active users; ChatGPT is weekly active users and has not yet been reported at one billion.
A billion is the finish line. The sprint that reveals how much the ground has shifted is the first 100 million — plotted here on a logarithmic strip, slowest at left.
Threads launched into Instagram's existing account graph: 2 million sign-ups in the first two hours, 10 million in seven, 100 million in five days. It is less a measure of demand than of distribution — proof that once a billion people already hold the pipe, a new product can fill it overnight.
ChatGPT's reported weekly active users, from the first published figure in November 2023 to OpenAI's February 2026 disclosure.
Every one of those weekly sessions runs on a machine somewhere. The IEA puts global data-centre electricity use at roughly 415 TWh in 2024 — about 1.5% of world electricity — and projects it roughly doubling by 2030.
Share of total data-centre energy demand attributable to AI servers in 2024, per the IEA. Accelerated servers are projected to grow ~30% a year.
OpenAI's February 2026 funding round — $50B from Amazon, $30B each from Nvidia and SoftBank — at a $730 billion pre-money valuation.
Annual growth in data-centre electricity consumption 2024–2030 — more than four times the growth rate of all other electricity demand combined.
The adoption curves above all run on top of internet access — and access is still the thing that is unevenly distributed.
Globally, 5G reaches 55% of the world's population in 2025 — but that single average hides a 21-fold gap between the richest and poorest countries. The next billion users of anything will come from the 2.2 billion who are not yet online at all.
The telephone had to be built pole by pole. ChatGPT shipped as a URL onto 5 billion devices that already existed. Nothing had to be installed — which is why the last five years of adoption records were all set by software that rode on hardware someone else paid for.
"Users" means sign-ups for Threads, monthly actives for TikTok, weekly actives for ChatGPT and subscriptions for the telephone. The definitions are not interchangeable, and the fastest-growing numbers are usually the loosest ones. Ask what is being counted before you compare.
Adoption now outruns the grid, the regulator and the research. Data-centre demand is growing four times faster than everything else on the electricity system, and 2.2 billion people still have no connection at all — the acceleration is real, but it is not universal.
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