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

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET 

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

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SHOW NOTES:

• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - NOV 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - OCT 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - SEPT 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - AUG 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - JUL 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - JUN 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - MAY 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - APR 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - MAR 2025 (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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