How much power is enough for AI? Nobody knows, not even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman or Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.<\/p>\n
That has put software-first businesses like OpenAI and Microsoft in a bind. Much of the tech world has been focused on compute as a major barrier to AI deployment. And while tech companies have been racing<\/a> to secure power<\/a>, those efforts have lagged GPU purchases to the point where Microsoft has apparently ordered too many chips for the amount of power it has contracted.<\/p>\n \u201cThe cycles of demand and supply in this particular case you can\u2019t really predict,\u201d Nadella said on the BG2 podcast<\/a>. \u201cThe biggest issue we are now having is not a compute glut, but it\u2019s a power and it\u2019s sort of the ability to get the [data center] builds done fast enough close to power.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf you can\u2019t do that, you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can\u2019t plug in. In fact, that is my problem today. It\u2019s not a supply issue of chips; it\u2019s the fact that I don\u2019t have warm shells to plug into,\u201d Nadella added, referring to the commercial real estate term for buildings ready for tenants.<\/p>\n In some ways, we\u2019re seeing what happens when companies accustomed to dealing with silicon and code, two technologies that scale and deploy quickly compared with massive power plants, need to ramp up their efforts in the energy world.<\/p>\n For more than a decade, electricity demand in the U.S. was flat. But over the last five years, demand from data centers has begun to ramp up<\/a>, outpacing utilities\u2019 plans for new generating capacity. That has led data center developers to add power in so-called behind-the-meter arrangements, where electricity is fed directly to the data center, skipping the grid.<\/p>\n Altman, who was also on the podcast, thinks that trouble could be brewing: \u201cIf a very cheap form of energy comes online soon at mass scale, then a lot of people are going to be extremely burned with existing contracts they\u2019ve signed.\u201d<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco \u201cIf we can continue this unbelievable reduction in cost per unit of intelligence \u2014 let\u2019s say it\u2019s been averaging like 40x for a given level per year \u2014 you know, that\u2019s like a very scary exponent from an infrastructure buildout standpoint,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Altman has invested in nuclear energy, including fission startup Oklo<\/a> and fusion startup Helion<\/a>, along with Exowatt, a solar startup that concentrates the sun\u2019s heat and stores it for later use.<\/p>\n None of those are ready for widespread deployment today, though, and fossil-based technologies like natural gas power plants take years to build. Plus, orders placed today for new gas turbine likely won\u2019t get fulfilled until later this decade.<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n