IDC's Worldwide AI Processor and Accelerator Taxonomy, 2026

Description

This IDC study provides a revised overview of the worldwide AI processor and accelerator market for 2026 and classifies the processors and accelerators that power AI compute across the internet system landscape. It describes how IDC views the market segmentation by deployment location, industry, silicon roles (host processors versus accelerators), AI modality, level of compute, and processor architecture. For 2026, this study reflects a more nuanced view of AI compute class and modality as well as processor architecture. "AI compute is no longer confined to the datacenter. It spans a continuum from cloud training clusters to edge gateways and endpoints, enabled by evolving combinations of host processors and accelerator architectures. This study captures IDC's view of how AI processors and accelerators are defined, segmented, and consistently classified across that distributed landscape," says Nina Turner, research director, Edge AI Processors and Accelerators.

Product Code: US53886326

IDC's Worldwide AI Processor and Accelerator Taxonomy

AI Processor and Accelerator Taxonomy Changes for 2026

Definitions

Deployment location
- Datacenter
  - AI in the datacenter
- Communications infrastructure
  - AI in communications infrastructure
- Edge infrastructure
  - Heavy edge infrastructure
    - AI in heavy edge infrastructure
  - Light edge infrastructure
    - AI in light edge infrastructure
- Primary clients
  - AI in primary clients
  - AI personal computer
  - AI smartphone
- Edge endpoints
  - AI in IoT/edge endpoints
Non-IT industry segment
- Automotive
- Consumer
- Energy
- Healthcare
- Industrial
- Retail
- Smart City
- Transportation
AI compute class
- Model development and training
- Cloud-scale inference
- Edge and client inference
- AI data infrastructure
AI modality
- Language
- Vision
- Speech and audio
- Multimodal
- Recommender and ranking
- Time series and anomaly detection
- Graph machine learning
- Planning and control
Commercial model
- Merchant silicon
- Captive or in-house silicon
- Semicustom or co-designed silicon
Architecture
- Arm
- x86
- RISC-V
- Power
- MIPS
- SH
- Other or proprietary
Host processors
- AI support
- Microprocessor unit
  - AI support
- Microcontroller unit
  - AI support
- Application-specific standard product - SoC
  - AI support
- Application-specific integrated circuit - SoC
  - AI support
- Field-programmable gate array
  - AI support
Accelerators
- AI applications
  - Application-specific standard product - Accelerator
  - AI applications
- Application-specific integrated circuit - Accelerator
  - AI applications
- Digital signal processor
  - AI application
- Data processing unit
  - AI applications
- Field-programmable gate array - Accelerator
  - AI applications
- Graphics processing unit
  - AI applications
- Neural processing unit
  - AI applications

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Synopsis