AI lab leader: compute demand will stay high, but profits may shift from chips to sites and power

In the guest’s view, demand for compute currently exceeds supply: obtaining it from a hyperscaler or a newer cloud provider is expensive, and he sees no sign that demand is about to ease. He compared AI’s current diffusion to the early mobile-phone era and the first days of email, and predicts “insatiable” demand over the next 3–5 years.

At the same time, the market is trying to determine whether enough money can be found to fund the required capacity buildout and which business models will survive. In his assessment, profits currently sit with memory and chip makers—the industry’s bottlenecks. Later, data-center sites, power and land could become the constraints. In the long run, large AI businesses need to participate in the profit pools themselves rather than merely pass revenue through to infrastructure players. He said he would not call the situation a bubble.