Charts That Explain the State of AI in 2026

Stanford's AI Index 2026 report is a massive report that aggregates trends across the AI industry, including benchmark performance, investment, compute capacity, and carbon emissions.

Key National and Industry Trends

• The United States leads in notable AI model releases, with over 90% of models emerging from industry rather than academia.
• Meanwhile, China holds an overwhelming lead in industrial robot installations, widening the gap with the US.

Infrastructure and Environmental Impact

• Global AI compute capacity has surged more than threefold every year since 2022, with Nvidia GPUs accounting for over 60% of total capacity.
• Carbon emissions from AI training and inference continue to raise concerns. The training emissions of recent models such as Grok 4 are estimated to be very high.

Model Performance and Research Trends

• Benchmark performance for multimodal LLMs and Agentic AI (autonomous coding, autonomous computer use, etc.) is rising sharply.
• AI adoption in healthcare has accelerated, with a surge in research related to drug discovery and multimodal biomedical applications.
• However, limitations remain in basic visual understanding tasks, such as reading analog clocks.