Performance per dollar in chips grows 49 per cent a year
Epoch AI computed performance per dollar for the accelerators actually bought: in constant 2025 dollars, an average of 49 per cent growth a year, a doubling every 1.7 years.
Why it matters
The cost of compute was measured as a buyer experiences it - weighted by what was actually purchased - and given a doubling time.
The publication is dated 13 August 2026. The metric is the combined computing performance of the chips purchased divided by the dollars spent on them, in constant 2025 dollars. It covers 24 accelerators from NVIDIA, AMD, Google, Huawei, Amazon and Cambricon. A log-linear fit over the twelve quarters from the first quarter of 2023 to the fourth quarter of 2025 gives an average of 49 per cent growth per year, meaning the performance a dollar buys doubles every 1.7 years. In absolute terms the figure rose from about 5.6 times 10 to the eleventh bit-operations per second per dollar in the first quarter of 2023 to about 1.4 times 10 to the twelfth.