The Cloudcast

Cloud and AI Predictions for 2026

• Massive Studios

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Aaron and Brian make some bold predictions for the 2026 Cloud and AI markets, as well as reviewing the biggest issues going into 2026.  

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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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Brian Gracely

Host
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Aaron Delp

Co-host