Global Cloud Engineering Simulation Community Passes 900,000 Users, Growing by More Than 500 a Day
A record 160,000+ engineers, designers and students joined in the past year, spanning more than 190 countries and every major engineering discipline, as cloud and AI move simulation from a late-stage specialist step into everyday design work.
MUNICH, July 30, 2026 — More than 900,000 engineers, designers and students now build and test their products on SimScale, the AI-native cloud platform for engineering simulation. The community crossed the milestone this week, capping the fastest growth in the company’s history. More than 160,000 new users joined in 2025, the biggest year on record and a jump of over 60% on the year before. The pace has not let up. In the first six months of 2026 alone, more than 100,000 engineers have signed up, already more than joined in all of 2024, meaning a new engineer, designer or student now creates an account roughly every two and a half minutes.
The number is more than a vanity metric. For most of engineering history, simulation was a specialist activity, run by a small number of CFD and FEA analysts, on expensive on-premise hardware, at the very end of the design process, when the important decisions had already been locked in. A community approaching a million users is evidence that this model is gone. Driven by cloud access, guided workflows, and now Engineering AI and Physics AI, analysis is shifting “early and broad”: tested by design engineers on day one, across far more of the product, rather than by a handful of experts at the end. That shift matters at a moment when electrification, energy-transition mandates, and compressed innovation cycles are forcing engineering teams to make more decisions, faster, with less room for late-stage surprises.
That shift is about to accelerate. In August 2026, SimScale will put its Engineering AI agents in the hands of the full community. It is the first time agentic engineering simulation has been made available to the world’s largest engineering simulation community, letting engineers hand off routine setup, exploration and analysis to AI that works inside their existing workflow.
“For most of engineering history, simulation was something a handful of specialists did at the very end of a project, long after the decisions that mattered had already been made,” said David Heiny, CEO of SimScale.
David Heiny
CEO, SimScale
“What 900,000 users tell us is that this has flipped. Engineers are testing ideas on day one, with zero simulation lead times. When you can explore thousands of design decisions in seconds, time stops being the constraint to innovation, and that changes what an individual engineer is capable of.”
The composition of the community is as striking as its size. Users now span more than 190 countries, with the largest community in the United States (236,000+). They come from across the engineering economy: the built environment and AEC, industrial machinery and equipment, energy, manufacturing, electronics, automotive and aerospace are the most heavily represented sectors. And they range from solo practitioners to the world’s largest enterprises. More than 150,000 users are independent or work at micro-firms of ten people or fewer, while over 140,000 come from organizations with more than 1,000 employees.
“What strikes me most is who is signing up,” said John Webster, VP of Marketing at SimScale. “It isn’t only CFD analysts at big automotive firms. It’s a mechanical designer at a ten-person startup, a researcher validating a thesis, an HVAC engineer sizing a data-center cooling loop. Nearly a third of the community is in academia, which means the next generation of engineers is learning to simulate from day one, not treating it as a specialist skill they might pick up later. That changes the whole profession.”
To date, the community has run close to 6 million cloud simulations on the platform, work that, in the old model, would have required racks of dedicated hardware, specialist licenses and weeks of queue time. The academic share of the community now stands at roughly 320,000 students and researchers, seeding the next wave of simulation-literate engineers entering industry.
About SimScale
SimScale is the AI-native cloud platform for engineering simulation. Trusted by more than 900,000 users, SimScale empowers engineers everywhere to innovate faster by exploring thousands of engineering decisions in seconds. By integrating Engineering AI workflows with computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis (FEA), electromagnetic, and thermal simulation in a single cloud-native platform, SimScale empowers teams to engineer the irreplaceable. For more information, visit www.simscale.com.
Media contact: marketing@simscale.com
