State of AI: Compute Index 2026

The fifth State of AI Compute Index, in collaboration with Zeta Alpha. After a soft 2025, open AI research citations rebounded in 2026 - and NVIDIA still appears in ~91% of them. But the bigger story has moved off the page: Hopper is now the live installed base, Blackwell is mostly still pipeline, and frontier labs have started buying compute by the gigawatt. Nathan walks through what changed, what didn't, and why "GPU count" is becoming the wrong question.

Read the full piece and explore the live charts: https://www.stateof.ai/compute

Chapters

• (00:00) What's new in v5 - citations, infrastructure, and gigawatts
• (01:25) The breather was short: 2025 was a pause, not a rollover
• (03:15) NVIDIA at ~91%, and the challengers - AMD, Huawei, Apple, TPU
• (05:05) Inside NVIDIA: the handover from A100 to Hopper to Blackwell
• (06:55) Startup silicon fragments - Groq, Cerebras, and the NVIDIA deal
• (08:20) Hopper is the installed base: 460k deployed GPUs
• (09:50) Blackwell is mostly pipeline: 80% still announced
• (11:00) The demand side, measured in gigawatts
• (12:15) Looking ahead, and why a GPU order isn't a cluster

Links:

• Full index and charts: https://www.stateof.ai/compute
• State of AI Report: https://www.stateof.ai
• Air Street Press: https://press.airstreet.com

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