Cloud and AI Predictions for 2026

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 (docs.google.com/document/d/1niJI-5YamE-WBd-a47…)
SHOW VIDEO: youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET
CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw
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SHOW NOTES:
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - NOV 2025 (thecloudcast.net/2025/12/ai-cloud-trends-for-n…) (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - OCT 2025 (thecloudcast.net/2025/11/ai-cloud-trends-for-o…) (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - SEPT 2025 (thecloudcast.net/2025/10/ai-cloud-trends-for-s…) (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - AUG 2025 (thecloudcast.net/2025/09/ai-cloud-trends-for-a…) (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - JUL 2025 (thecloudcast.net/2025/08/ai-cloud-trends-for-j…) (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - JUN 2025 (thecloudcast.net/2025/07/ai-cloud-trends-for-j…) (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - MAY 2025 (thecloudcast.net/2025/06/ai-cloud-trends-for-m…)(show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - APR 2025 (thecloudcast.net/2025/05/ai-cloud-trends-for-a…) (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - MAR 2025 (thecloudcast.net/2025/04/ai-cloud-trends-for-m…) (show)
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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