Aaron and Brian make some bold predictions for the 2026 Cloud and AI markets, as well as reviewing the biggest issues going into 2026.
SHOW: 989
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #989 Transcript
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SHOW NOTES:
2026 CLOUD + AI PREDICTIONS (AND BIG ISSUES TO REVIEW)
- OpenAI Revenues and Focus Areas
- NVIDIA customer profitability
- Companies moving to GOOG TPUs
- Enterprise success beyond CoPilot/Gemini
- Enterprise data+model trainability
- Enterprise price hikes
- Broadcom, AMD, Groq - alternative HW options
- Data Center buildouts
- Does AI spending shift
- What is Agentic AI?
- Long term spending + short term refocuses
PREDICTIONS:
- At least one big AI IPO in 2026, and it won’t go well. (Aaron says Anthropic)
- People will question whether Sam Altman is the right person to lead OpenAI
- AI will be a central issue in the 2026 US elections, either about job losses or electricity prices
- One major LPU/TPU/dedicated inference chip will break through in 2026
- Azure will be the Number One Cloud… (Aaron has to keep it going)
- We will start to see a shift in the Enterprise from big models in the sky (1+trillion parameters) to dedicated, purpose-built models of 500M or less in size for efficiency and security
- Gemini will dominate the consumer/prosumer space, OpenAI will go through the trough of disillusionment
- The industry will shift to a base/instruct and a reasoning split of models
- AWS and Azure will double down on being a solutions provider instead of a primitive supplier for AI and infrastructure
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