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Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, has been steadily expanding its presence in the United States over recent months, according to data. Despite facing widespread criticism and regulatory scrutiny for promoting non-consensual sexually explicit images of women and minors, the tool’s market share in the U.S. increased to 17.8% last month from 14% in December, and just 1.9% in January 2025, based on research from Apptopia.
This growth is promising for xAI, the startup backed by Musk that developed Grok. Founded around three years ago, xAI has been rapidly investing in infrastructure to remain competitive in Silicon Valley’s intense AI race. The rise in usage also precedes Musk’s SpaceX initial public offering, which acquired xAI earlier this month to further unify his business empire. The aim is to eventually establish AI data centers in orbit.
The deal values SpaceX at approximately $1 trillion, with xAI estimated at $250 billion, according to Reuters. Data visualizations show a significant jump in Grok’s market share, positioning it as the third most-used AI assistant in the U.S. in January, trailing only OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini. ChatGPT saw its share drop from 80.9% last January to 52.9%, while Gemini’s share increased from 17.3% to 29.4%.
Industry analysts suggest that Grok’s integration with Musk’s X social media platform has played a key role in its rise. X has embedded Grok into its interface, including placing it on the navigation bar and offering premium tiers bundled with paid subscriptions.
Recently, Grok generated controversy by producing near-nude images of real individuals in response to user prompts—prompting worldwide outrage and investigations. Although X announced measures to prevent Grok from creating such images on its platform, Reuters earlier this month found that Grok can still produce similar content when directly prompted. Neither X nor xAI responded to Reuters’ inquiries about the matter.
The data was first reported by Alex Kantrowitz’s Big Technology newsletter.
In management news, Musk overhauled xAI’s leadership this past Wednesday after several co-founders departed, leaving only six of the original twelve and raising concerns about the company’s stability. Yet, Musk remains optimistic about the platform’s growth, highlighting its image-generation capability.
An xAI executive compared the company’s output to Google, stating, “We’ve generated 6 billion images in the past 30 days… Google recently said it produced 1 billion images using Nano Banana in the same period,” adding, “So, you know, we’re six times that.” Visual data show a steady rise in app downloads and active users, with a sizable portion of Grok’s user base being male, as illustrated by recent activity graphs.
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