Chamath's open-source AI prediction names the clouds set to win
As seen on the 24/7 Wall St. homepage on September 19, 2026.
Chamath is naming the neoclouds he thinks get paid if open models take the top three spots, with Nebius and IREN leading his list. The data he is quoting shows open models at 78.4% of token volume on Vercel's AI Gateway.
Prediction: within 12 months, top three models will be open source. Economic winners will be the American clouds that serve them: Nebius Iren Baseten Together Fireworks https://t.co/IMXjkJxP37 [Quoted @rauchg]: Looks like today may be a record day for token volume % of open models on Vercel AI Gateway: 🟦 Open 78.4% 🟨 Closed 21.6% While spend 💲 usually tells a different story, #3 and #4 today are Moonshot AI & DeepSeek. Adding Z.ai, their combined spend surpasses OpenAI (#2). https://t.co/vFMh3xEt83
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Chamath Palihapitiya posted a direct prediction on September 19: within 12 months, the top three AI models will be open source. He is putting a concrete timeline on a shift that, if it plays out, reshapes where AI infrastructure spending lands.
The data point he is building on comes from Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, who reported that open models accounted for 78.4% of token volume on Vercel's AI Gateway on that day, a figure Rauch described as a record. Closed models stood at just 21.6% of volume, though Rauch noted that spend figures tell a different story.
Rauch's data also flagged that Moonshot AI and DeepSeek ranked third and fourth by token volume, and that combining those two with Z.ai pushed their collective spend past OpenAI, which ranked second. Palihapitiya is treating that spend signal as evidence that the economics are already tilting toward open and international models.
Rather than naming model makers as the winners, Palihapitiya pointed to the American cloud platforms that would serve open models at scale: Nebius, IREN, Baseten, Together, and Fireworks. His framing puts the infrastructure layer as the primary economic beneficiary if his prediction holds.