Global AI computing capacity doubles every seven months
Epoch AI estimated the total computing capacity of AI chips across all major designers: a doubling every 7 months, and growth of about 3.3x a year since 2022.
Why it matters
A growth rate now exists for the world's whole stock of AI compute, rather than for one company's purchases, with a stated method and a confidence interval.
The estimate is 3.3x per year since 2022, with a 90 per cent interval of 2.7x to 4.1x, equivalent to a doubling time of 7 months with an interval of 6 to 8 months. The method is a log-linear regression on quarterly AI chip sales converted into H100 equivalents. NVIDIA data is available from the first quarter of 2022 and Google data from the fourth quarter of 2022, but other manufacturers enter only from the first quarter of 2024, so the early quarters rest on two suppliers. The measure counts available capacity rather than installed or utilised capacity: it counts chips sold, not clusters running.