“For much of this year, demand has shown us that demand is red hot right now,” said CRN's Dylan Martin.
This year, 2026 looks like another historic chapter in the enterprise AI book, as solution providers large and small, with specializations across nearly every industry and region, are exploring new business opportunities from artificial intelligence infrastructure and applications.
To help solution providers usher in the new year with a focus on what matters most, CRN editors Dylan Martin and Wade Tyler Millward analyzed the storylines and angles we're most excited about next year.
Martin, a CRN senior editor who has focused on AI infrastructure and semiconductors, said NVIDIA is on track to $500 billion in revenue from Blackwell and Rubin's graphics processing unit (GPU) platforms.
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AI in the Channel 2026
He is also watching Nvidia's rival Advanced Micro Devices try to grab market share and generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue from its AI chips by 2027.
“There's certainly been a lot of debate about whether we're in a bubble or not, but most of this year has shown that demand is red hot right now,” Martin said. “Do you see any changes in that?”
Millward, a CRN senior associate editor covering AI applications and cloud vendors, said that in addition to AI vendors evolving how customers pay for AI applications, they are also concerned about the cost of AI, with a variety of payment models emerging in 2025, from per-license to per-conversation to even outcome-based pricing.
He also looks at how partners, partner customers, and vendors are successfully leveraging AI to automate manual tasks to the point where they can reduce the number of human employees needed to run various business operations.
“I still hold the view that we don't really know the full cost of AI,” Millward said.
Watch the video above to hear more from our editors on the biggest stories channels are likely to see from AI in 2026.
