At Hot Chips ‘26, all eyes were on AI costs, GPUs — and the future

When you think of AI, and Nvidia’s GPUs often come to mind because they have been so much a part of the ongoing AI revolution. But at the recent Hot Chips show in California, an alternative future appears to be taking shape as corporate concerns continue to grow about cost, energy use and AI slowdowns. New AI chips detailed at the event by OpenAI, Intel, Meta and others promise cheaper and faster token generation at lower power consumption. Chipmakers are also moving AI away from GPUs and onto CPUs and PCs. “What Hot Chips demonstrated…is that the market underneath Nvidia is becoming much more diverse,” said Stephen Sopko, an analyst at Hyperframe Research. Though enterprise AI budgets continue to go up, the focus is increasingly on finding ways to make AI more productive and reducing waste in the budget. “But I would not tell CIOs that their AI budgets are therefore going down,” Sopko said. Hot Chips pointed to a future where more AI work can be squeezed out of the same watt, rack or dollar with new hardware designs and power management. “The cost of performing a given unit of AI work should continue falling dramatically,” Sopko said. OpenAI shared details of its homegrown AI chi…

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