The Economist.
Official intelligence labs have a big problem.
AI demand is so white hot that the frontier labs cannot build data centers
and find compute fast enough to serve their users.
Demand for AI is booming, partly because of the growing use of coding tools.
But the industry just can't keep up.
Firms like Google are increasingly supply constrained.
Obviously, we are compute constrained in the near term.
As an example, our cloud revenue would have been higher if we were able to meet the demand.
This year, five hyperscalers, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle,
will together spend more than $750 billion on capital expenditure.
But adding AI capacity quickly is hard.
Chips are scarce, and local opposition to energy-hungry data centers is rising.
Protesters rallying today outside of a proposed data center in Saline Township.
The data center is going to increase traffic, pollution, and everyone's electric bill is going to go up.
It's not okay.
So today, just how serious are the new bottlenecks for artificial intelligence?
You're listening to Money Talks from The Economist,
our weekly podcast on the markets, the economy, and the world of business.
In Washington, D.C. I'm Alice Fullwood.