Internet Trends 2026

Her best calls were great. Her misses were printed too.

Three regions are nearly done connecting. One is a third done.

City, countryside, men, women: the gaps stack.

About 180 million more women than men are offline.

The phone won. It is not close.

Two apps now hold 3 billion people each.

Two giants tie at the top of monthly reach.

Share of online adults who used each in the previous month, by survey self-report.

Five days.

Each line ends the day that service crossed one million users. For scale: Facebook took about 10 months, Netflix about 3.4 years.

Then ChatGPT kept going.

Weekly users, each rung an OpenAI executive statement. The last rung is Sam Altman at DevDay, September 29, 2026, as reported; OpenAI has not published that figure on its own site, and we label it that way.

Most ChatGPT use is not work. It is life.

Practical guidance, seeking information, writing. And growth is strongest in low and middle income countries.

Using it is normal. Scaling it is rare.

Industry builds the frontier now.

Nearly 90 percent of notable models in 2024 came from industry, up from 60 percent in 2023.

The price of intelligence fell 280 fold.

At GPT-3.5 level performance. When a capability gets 280 times cheaper in two years, it stops being a feature and becomes infrastructure.

The second company is on a rocket of its own.

Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate, every rung stated by Anthropic itself in its own announcements. Reports since put it higher still ($65 billion per Bloomberg, July 2026; $100 billion per The New York Times, September 2026). Those are reported figures, not company statements, so they stay in this footnote.

Big customers multiplied eighty fold.

Customers spending over one million dollars a year with Anthropic. One disclosure Anthropic has never made: a Claude user count. The circulating numbers are third party visit estimates, so they are not charted here.

AI is now an electricity story.

of electricity a year for data centres by 2030, more than double today, roughly Japan's entire electricity consumption. Demand from AI optimised centres more than quadruples.

Training runs are getting heavier, fast.

Tonnes of CO2 equivalent. Training compute doubles roughly every five months; hardware efficiency improves about 40 percent a year, and demand is winning.

Online courses crossed into the hundreds of millions.

registered learners on Coursera alone, adding 7.5 million in a single quarter. Its AI courses passed 10 million enrollments, arriving at 12 a minute. edX reports 100 million learners of its own.

Online stayed mainstream after the emergency ended.

9.4 million undergraduates took at least one distance course in fall 2021, up from 36 percent taking any in 2019.

Employers say two skills in five are about to change.

Hybrid is the settlement, and it is holding.

Where AI skills get hired, per job ad.

Share of 2024 job postings requiring AI skills. Generative AI as a named skill quadrupled its U.S. posting share in one year, 0.05 to 0.22 percent.

The world's mood on AI splits by region.

Sixty percent of people worldwide expect AI to change their job within five years. Optimism and adoption travel together.

The checkout moved to the phone, then to three aisles.

The ad money lives online now.

U.S. internet advertising revenue reached $258.6 billion in 2024. Social was the fastest riser, up 36.7 percent.

The same data costs 22 times more of a poor income.

Connected is not the same as connected well.

A smartphone in the highest use region moves more than seven times the monthly data of one in Sub-Saharan Africa.