Inference spending to surpass training for the first time in 2026, rise of Token factories to change AI infrastructure investment logic
Gartner predicts that global inference spending will reach $23.3 billion in 2026, surpassing training spending of $19 billion for the first time and accounting for 55% of total AI IaaS spending; a CAICT report predicts that in 2026 inference computing power will account for 70.5% of total AI computing load. Multiple industry insiders point out that Hugging Face weight downloads and OpenRouter Token call volumes are often conflated as overseas expansion results, but Token call volume does not equal revenue; Token going global is essentially inference services going global, which is more directly related to actual revenue. Public cloud giants, independent MaaS inference service providers, and GPU vendors are all laying out Token factories, with compliance and global low-latency distribution being the main current bottlenecks.
total AI IaaS spending; a CAICT report predicts that in 2026 inference computing power will account for 70.5% of total AI computing load. Multiple industry insiders point out that Hugging Face weight downloads and OpenRouter Token call volumes are often conflated as overseas expansion results, but Token call volume does not equal revenue; Token going global is essentially inference services going global, which is more directly related to actual revenue. Public cloud giants, independent MaaS infe
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