Building the Inference Cloud, and What Comes Next

Building the Inference Cloud, and What Comes Next AI built for today’s businesses The next evolution of Droplets, networking, and accounts Enhanced storage for larger workloads The AI Ecosystem to expand your reach 2026 is the year of the inference cloud About the author Try DigitalOcean for free Related Articles A More Powerful, Code-First Knowledge Base Experience on the DigitalOcean Gradient™ AI Platform Introducing DigitalOcean Gradient™ AI Agent Development Kit: A code-first way to build production-ready AI agents Now Available: Remote MCP for DigitalOcean Services By Paddy Srinivasan CEO, DigitalOcean Published: January 7, 2026 4 min read 2025 was a defining year for DigitalOcean, not only because we shipped more products and features than ever before, but because we solidified our vision about what the next era of cloud and AI will look like. We supported customers as they ran inference at scale, launched new products, engaged with our community in-person and online, and built out our inference cloud, which gives digital native enterprises and AI-native businesses the power to integrate AI and cloud workflows through one unified platform. At DigitalOcean, we know our customers are busy working on the same things we are—innovating with speed, integrating AI into their applications, and navigating rapid industry changes. Developers and digital native enterprises don’t want complexity, they want the ability to build quickly, scale with ease, and create with AI without requiring additional resources or time. Everything we built in 2025 was guided by those principles, and I can’t wait to share our 2026 plans with you soon. AI crossed an important threshold in 2025, becoming foundational to the work of not only large enterprises, but also digital native enterprises and startups. Our upcoming Currents research report confirms this, showing that 52% of organizations are actively implementing AI solutions, optimizing AI performance, or treating AI as a core component of their business strategy, compared to 35% who said the same in 2024. Our mission in 2025 was to make AI as simple and accessible as possible to cloud builders. To that end, in January we launched DigitalOcean Gradient AI Platform, and rapidly expanded its capabilities over the course of the year. The Gradient AI Platforms enables builders to: Build scalable AI agents: Deploy AI tools tailored to your specific needs using hosted third party LLMs, RAG workflows, and function calls. Build scalable AI agents: Deploy AI tools tailored to your specific needs using hosted third party LLMs, RAG workflows, and function calls. Seamlessly integrate with workflows: Embed agents into your applications through APIs or chatbot plugins.