"We've been growing a lot and are out of GPUs."
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO
Mar 2025 "We are still waving off customers or scheduling them out into the future. This is a situation that we have not seen in our history."
Safra Catz, Oracle CEO
Oct 2025
"You may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can't plug in. I don't have warm shells to plug into."
Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO
Feb 2026
"What keeps us up at night… The top question is definitely around capacity. All constraints — be it power, land, supply chain constraints — how do you ramp up to meet this extraordinary demand?"
Sundar Pichai, Alphabet CEO
Feb 2026
"There's no relief as far as I know. No relief until 2028."
Lip-Bu Tan, Intel CEO
What happens when your AI doesn’t answer?
Everything is in short supply. It’s no longer just GPUs. It’s power. Data centers. Memory. CPUs.
If there’s no relief for six more quarters, perhaps it’s time to plan for a world where inference isn’t freely available on-demand.
Inference prices, which have been static, will rise. Subsidies will be harder to justify.
Enterprises will need to rationalize workloads, deciding which teams receive state-of-the-art models & which don’t. Not every CRM update requires a trillion-parameter frontier model.
Inference rationing normalizes. Marketing receives this much, sales receives that much, software engineers probably receive a lot more.
Constraint will be the mother of invention. Companies will optimize what they have, adopt open source where they can, and likely move to smaller models for many workloads.