“Most of this year has shown us that demand is just red hot right now,” says CRN’s Dylan Martin.
This year, solution providers large and small, with specialties spanning just about every industry and geography, have tapped new business opportunities from artificial intelligence infrastructure and applications. 2026 is shaping up to be another historic chapter in the book of enterprise AI.
To help solution providers enter the new year by focusing on what matters most, CRN editors Dylan Martin and Wade Tyler Millward have detailed the storylines and angles they’ll be watching more closely next year.
Martin, a CRN editor whose coverage has focused on AI infrastructure and semiconductors, said he was following Nvidia’s path to $500 billion in revenue through its Blackwell and Rubin graphics processing unit (GPU) platforms.
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AI in the chain 2026
It is also monitoring attempts by Nvidia rival Advanced Micro Devices to try to take share and achieve tens of billions of dollars in sales from its AI chips by 2027.
“Even though there’s been a lot of discussion about whether or not we’re in a bubble right now, most of this year has shown us that demand is just red hot right now,” Martin said. “Are we going to see any changes to that?
Millward, CRN’s senior associate editor covering AI applications and cloud providers, said he’s interested in the cost of AI, and not just as AI providers evolve how customers pay for AI applications, with 2025 seeing a variety of compensation models from licensing to conversational to even outcome-based pricing.
It also researches where partners, customer partners and suppliers are successfully automating manual tasks using AI and whether this is reaching the point of requiring fewer human employees for different business operations.
“I still believe we don’t really know the full cost of” AI, Millward said.
Watch the video above to hear more about these editors’ views on the biggest stories the channel could see regarding AI in 2026.