CHONGQING M&E rose about 20% in Hong Kong. The surge follows comments from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who stated in a joint interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that the AI industry's current challenge is not an oversupply of computing power but a lack of sufficient electricity to support all GPU operations.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during an interview alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that the problem in the AI industry is not an excess supply of compute, but rather a lack of power to accommodate all those GPUs. In fact, Nadella said that the company currently has a problem of not having enough power to plug in some of the AI GPUs the firm has in inventory. He said this on YouTube in response to Brad Gerstner, the host of Bg2 Pod, when asked whether Nadella and Altman agreed with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who said there is no chance of a compute glut in the next two to three years.

“I think the cycles of demand and supply in this particular case, you can’t really predict, right? The point is: what’s the secular trend? The secular trend is what Sam (OpenAI CEO) said, which is, at the end of the day, because quite frankly, the biggest issue we are now having is not a compute glut, but it’s power — it’s sort of the ability to get the builds done fast enough close to power,” Satya said in the podcast. “So, if you can’t do that, you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in. In fact, that is my problem today. It’s not a supply issue of chips; it’s actually the fact that I don’t have warm shells to plug into.” [Emphasis added]

Nadella's mention of 'shells' refers to a data center shell, which is effectively an empty building with all of the necessary ingredients, such as power and water, needed to immediately begin production.

AI’s power consumption has been a topic many experts have discussed since last year. This came to the forefront as soon as Nvidia fixed the GPU shortage, and many tech companies are now investing in research in small modular nuclear reactors to help scale their power sources as they build increasingly large data centers.

This has already caused consumer energy bills to skyrocket, showing how the AI infrastructure being built out is negatively affecting the average American. OpenAI has even called on the federal government to build 100 gigawatts of power generation annually, saying that it’s a strategic asset in the U.S.’s push for supremacy in its AI race with China. This comes after some experts said Beijing is miles ahead in electricity supply due to its massive investments in hydropower and nuclear power.