At CES 2026, industry executives flagged a critical infrastructure challenge: powering the next wave of artificial intelligence adoption requires multiplying global compute capacity by roughly 100 times within the coming years. Current projections suggest around 5 billion daily active users will engage with AI applications by then—a scale that demands unprecedented computational resources. This exponential growth in compute demand touches everything from blockchain validation to decentralized AI networks, reshaping how we think about infrastructure investment and hardware capabilities across the ecosystem.