AI Inference Demand Reshapes Hardware Landscape

In 2026, AI inference has overtaken training as the primary focus for hardware makers due to the rise of reasoning models and agentic AI. Reasoning models can generate up to 20 times more text, and agentic AI runs inference continuously. This surge has led to major industry shifts, including Nvidia's $20 billion acquisition of Groq and Anthropic leasing over $1 billion per month in compute from SpaceXAI.