Java is becoming more popular for building AI applications, with 62% of respondents in Azul’s just-released 2026 State of Java Survey and Report relying on Java for AI development. Last year’s report had 50% of participants using Java for AI functionality.

Released February 10, the report featured findings from a survey of more than 2,000 Java users from September 2025 to November 2025. The report also found that 81% of participants have migrated, are migrating, or plan to migrate from Oracle’s Java to a non-Oracle OpenJDK distribution, with 92% expressing concern about Oracle Java pricing.

The survey discovered a clear trend toward embedding AI within enterprise systems that Java already powers, according to the report. The report noted that Java developers have many AI libraries to choose from when developing AI functionality, the most-used among respondents being JavaML, followed by Deep Java Library (DJL) and OpenCL. 31% said that more than half the code they produce includes AI functionality.

Respondents were also asked about the AI-powered code generation tools they used to create Java application code. Here OpenAI’s ChatGPT led the way, followed by Google Gemini Code Assist, Microsoft Visual Studio IntelliCode, and GitHub Copilot.

In other findings in the report:

• 18% had already adopted Java Development Kit (JDK) 25, the most recent Long Term Support (LTS) release, which became available in September 2025.
• 64% said more than half of their workloads or applications were built with Java or run on a JVM, compared to 68% last year.
• 43% said Java workloads account for more than half of their cloud compute bills.
• 63% said dead or unused code affects devops productivity to some extent or a great extent.