During peak finals season last May, users generated 97.4 billion tokens in a single day. Token generation serves as the primary measure of AI usage. ChatGPT 4.1 Mini led September’s surge, generating 26.9 billion tokens on the 18th alone. The newly launched GPT-5 contributed an additional 18.7 billion tokens on the same day. OpenAI must plan infrastructure and costs around academic schedules, knowing traffic will spike during finals and crash during vacations.