Epoch AI: New AI Chip Capacity Added Each Quarter Is Doubling Every 9 Months, but Growth Has Eased Since 2023

Research nonprofit Epoch AI published a new analysis on October 29: the computing power of AI chips sold each quarter has grown about 2.5 times per year since the start of 2024, a doubling time of about 9.1 months, with a 90% confidence interval of 8.4 to 10.0 months. The analysis, by Isabel Juniewicz and Josh You, draws on Epoch AI's own database of AI chip sales estimates, published openly under a Creative Commons licence.

Quarterly additions: from 0.8 million to 6.3 million H100-equivalents

Measured in Nvidia H100-equivalents (H100e), quarterly additions rose from 0.8 million in the first quarter of 2024 to 6.3 million in the second quarter of 2026. Nvidia accounted for 3.95 million of the latest quarter's additions and Google for 1.6 million; the estimates cover six chip designers - Nvidia, Google, AMD, Amazon, Huawei and Cambricon - using median estimates as of October 19, 2026. Note what is doubling here: new capacity added per quarter, not the total stock of chips already installed.

Has growth slowed? The authors say it is unresolved

Growth has eased from the 2023 surge, when quarterly additions rose roughly sixfold over the year as AI training and inference capacity expanded after the releases of ChatGPT and GPT-4, led by Nvidia's H100. Year-over-year growth in quarterly additions fell from 2.8 times in the second quarter of 2025 to 2.2 times in the second quarter of 2026, and the trend in quarterly growth rates fell from about 32% to about 19% per quarter. But the authors report that decline is not statistically significant (p = 0.26) and may reflect a lull between chip generations, such as Nvidia's Blackwell rollout in late 2024 and early 2025, rather than a genuine deceleration.

How the numbers are built, and their limits

Epoch AI flags several limits: its data track chips when they are sold, not when they come online, and Nvidia typically recognises revenue on delivery to a server assembly partner, so chips can take several more months to become operational in a data centre. The confidence intervals also reflect only how well the trend fits the median sales estimate, not uncertainty in the sales estimates themselves.