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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

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

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
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A lot changed in the world of Cloud and AI this year. And then it changed some more, and some more, and so more. The only constant was change. 

SHOW: 988

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #988 Transcript

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

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES

IT WAS AN INTERESTING YEAR IN CLOUD AND AI TECHNOLOGY

• AI has become a mainstream technology, political and social talking point
• AI went through 7yrs of news cycles in 1 yr
• DeepSeek - Maybe NVIDIA chips aren’t needed?
• NVIDIA acquihired Grok and their technology
• Maybe AWS’ lead in the cloud is now in question
• Google got their act together with GenAI, after inventing the technology in 2017
• Microsoft and OpenAI sort of broke up, or at least they are seeing other people
• OpenAI forecasts 100x their current revenue in future computing needs
• The US Gov’t either bailed out, or socialized Intel
• Bitcoin - 94k, up to 125k, down to 84k

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter/X: @cloudcastpod
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Aaron and Brian review the Year in AI, hand out AI awards, and discuss the biggest AI trends from 2025. Maybe a few predictions will be made as well.

SHOW: 987

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #987 Transcript

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

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

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)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - FEB 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - JAN 2025 (show)

2025 AI YEAR IN REVIEW

• The Year of OpenAI
• The Year of NVIDIA
• The Year of Microsoft
• The Year of Google
• The Year of Oracle
• The Year of China AI
• The Year of Apple
• The Year of Coding Agents (Anthropic, Cursor, Windsurf, CLIs, etc..)
• The Year of Data Centers
• AI Highlights and Lowlights (Corporate Layoffs, Acquihires, Funding, etc..)
• 2026 AI Draft

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
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If an AGI falls in the woods and nobody can define it, did it actually fall? This week we make an exact prediction of when AGI will happen, and the 10 ways it will immediately change the world. 

SHOW: 986

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #986 Transcript

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

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES

• Planning for AGI and Beyond (OpenAI) 
• Machines of Loving Grace (Anthropic)
• Microsoft and Google has different visions/opinions on AGI
• Amazon reorganizes around new AGI team reporting to Andy Jassy
• Mistral CEO says that AGI is a marketing move 
• AGI is defined by an independent committee in new Microsoft and OpenAI agreement
• Why does being first to AGI matter?
• Bret Taylor on the current status of AGI (Acquired/AC2 podcast, 2025)

WHAT DOES REACHING AGI PROVIDE FOR HUMANITY (or ANYTHING)?

• Y2K bug, 2038 Bug (techies are good at dates when things need to be patched)
• The % of people with Internet access
• The % of people with a smartphone
• The % of people with a certain level of education (basic or advanced)
• How much smarter is humanity than 10yrs ago? 20yrs ago? 
• How much smarter could existing humanity be at any given time? 
• Nobody has a consistent or measurable definition of AGI
• What are the Top 10 problems of humanity that need to be solved? (direct or indirect)
• Does reaching AGI enable certain government or corporate actions to start happening that couldn’t happen now? 

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter/X: @cloudcastpod
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Aaron and Brian review the Year in Cloud, hand out Cloud awards, and discuss the biggest cloud trends from 2025. Maybe a few predictions will be made as well. 

SHOW: 985

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #985 Transcript

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

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

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)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - FEB 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - JAN 2025 (show)

2025 CLOUD YEAR IN REVIEW

• Cloud of the year 
• Cloud concept of the year (non-AI)
• Cloud memory of the year
• Cloud revenues in 2025
• Are NeoClouds in the hyperscaler discussion? 
• Was Cloud (circa 2007) the actual downfall of Intel? (Cloud vs Mobile choice)
• Rank the clouds, end of 2025 (cloud draft 2025)
• Do outages matter if they are only once a year? 
• Where does AWS go next?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter/X: @cloudcastpod
• BlueSky: @cloudcastpod.bsky.social
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How difficult will it be to train and build an AI Agent that has expertise in a given domain? Will it happen in the next year, or 3 years or 10 years? And who will benefit in the marketplace from his evolution? 

SHOW: 984

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #984 Transcript

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

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• [Mailtrap] Try Mailtrap for free
• [Interconnected] Interconnected is a new series from Equinix diving into the infrastructure that keeps our digital world running. With expert guests and real-world insights, we explore the systems driving AI, automation, quantum, and more. Just search “Interconnected by Equinix”.

SHOW NOTES

• OpenAI looks to train their models to replace junior bankers

WHAT WOULD BE THE STAGES OF AN EXPERT AGENT?

• Train it on a set of standard knowledge (e.g. Masters of Accounting, Auditing, International Tax)
• Train it on a set of well-defined case studies, to provide industry context
• Train it on a set of adjacent case studies and other domains (business, law, specific industries)
• How to train corner cases?
• How to train gray areas like ethics, morality, or cost-benefit analysis? 
• Who is motivated to train these experts? 
• What would the cost of these experts be? Can it be similar to a human, or need to be a fraction, or a premium? 
• Is there a way to build memory (e.g. experience) without disclosing client information? 
• Is there a way to build shareable knowledge between agents for reinforcement training/learning?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
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Dan McConnell (Senior VP Product Management at @HitachiVantara) talks about how Enterprise infrastructure is having to evolve to keep up with the data challenges of AI. 

SHOW: 983

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #983 Transcript

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

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

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS" 

SPONSORS:

• [Interconnected] Interconnected is a new series from Equinix diving into the infrastructure that keeps our digital world running. With expert guests and real-world insights, we explore the systems driving AI, automation, quantum, and more. Just search “Interconnected by Equinix”.
• [Mailtrap] Try Mailtrap for free

SHOW NOTES:

• Hitachi Vantara (website)

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us about your background.

Topic 2 - How is AI changing the way enterprises need to think about infrastructure?

Topic 3 - What makes AI workloads so different from traditional workloads? How is AI exposing the limitations of broken cloud environments?

Topic 4 - Where are organizations feeling the most pressure? What are the biggest misconceptions enterprises have about preparing for AI?

Topic 5 - What problems come from managing separate systems? What is the biggest driving factor toward unified data platforms?

Topic 6 - How is Hitachi Vantara helping customers handle the growing infrastructure demands created by AI?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Bluesky: @cloudcastpod.bsky.social
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The PaaS of the future probably doesn't look anything like the PaaS of the past. AI should help bring in an era where we can abstract much more than just infrastructure to align technology and business. 

SHOW: 982

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #982 Transcript

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

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• [Mailtrap] Try Mailtrap for free
• [Interconnected] Interconnected is a new series from Equinix diving into the infrastructure that keeps our digital world running. With expert guests and real-world insights, we explore the systems driving AI, automation, quantum, and more. Just search “Interconnected by Equinix”.

SHOW NOTES

• Vercel v0
• Building Web Apps with just English and AI (Acquired podcast, Feb 2025)
• Vercel on The Cloudcast (2024)
• Vercel on The Cloudcast (2021)
• 8 tools to build your own PaaS (2025)

IS PAAS READY TO TAKE THE NEXT STEP? 

• Where could PaaS evolve to now?
  • Can new PaaS services abstract the developer, and just focus on business logic and business ideas? 
  • What languages or design patterns would be mandated? (web only, mobile only, web + mobile? )
  • Can we template “best practices” enough to be reliable?
  • Can we template compliances needed to handle financial transactions, customer data, etc.?
  • Can troubleshooting become an automated service?
• Where was PaaS in the past? (Heroku, Google AppEngine, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes)
• Language specific
• Cloud specific
• Abstracting the infrastructure and security

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter/X: @cloudcastpod
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Brian Gracely (@bgracely) and Brandon Whichard (@bwhichard, @SoftwareDefTalk) discuss the top stories in Cloud and AI from November 2025.

SHOW: 981

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #981 Transcript

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

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST:  "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SPONSORS:

• [Interconnected] Interconnected is a new series from Equinix diving into the infrastructure that keeps our digital world running. With expert guests and real-world insights, we explore the systems driving AI, automation, quantum, and more. Just search “Interconnected by Equinix”.
• [Mailtrap] Try Mailtrap for free

SHOW NOTES:

• Link to November 2025 News and Articles

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Bluesky: @cloudcastpod.bsky.social
• Twitter/X: @cloudcastpod
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As the Thanksgiving weekend passes, let's look at some technology things that we're thankful for and excited about. 

SHOW: 980

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #980 Transcript

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

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• [Mailtrap] Try Mailtrap for free
• [Interconnected] Interconnected is a new series from Equinix diving into the infrastructure that keeps our digital world running. With expert guests and real-world insights, we explore the systems driving AI, automation, quantum, and more. Just search “Interconnected by Equinix”.
• [TestKube] TestKube is Kubernetes-native testing platform, orchestrating all your test tools, environments, and pipelines into scalable workflows empowering Continuous Testing. Check it out at TestKube.io/cloudcast

SHOW NOTES

THINGS TO BE THANKFUL FOR:

• Thankful for health
• Happy Birthday to ChatGPT
• The feature on an iPhone that remembers the code sent in an SMS message
• Role playing, brain storming, scenario planning on ChatGPT/Gemini
• Tools like Vercel that let non-programmers use AI to build apps (the future of PaaS)
• Tools like NotebookLM making complex stuff like LLM training, RAG patterns,  
• True competition in the cloud market as differentiation emerges
• The beginnings of alternatives to NVIDIA in the AI HW Acceleration market
• The evolution of wearables like fitness trackers, or AirPods (better sound quality, noise cancelling, language translation, etc.) 

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter/X: @cloudcastpod
• BlueSky: @cloudcastpod.bsky.social
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