GPU capacity is tight, scattered and expensive to reach. The next constraint is not silicon. It is selling, routing and recovering compute by the hour.

The squeeze

Moody's forecasts that six companies, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Oracle and CoreWeave, will spend about $785 billion on capital equipment in 2026 and close to $1 trillion in 2027.

Then look at what that spending runs into. The International Energy Agency puts data center electricity use at 415 terawatt-hours in 2024, about 1.5 percent of the world's electricity, and projects about 945 terawatt-hours by 2030. Gartner predicted in November 2024 that 40 percent of existing AI data centers would be operationally constrained by power availability by 2027.

Getting power to a site is slow too. One analysis of grid data found that the median wait to connect a power plant to the grid rose from under 20 months in 2005 to 55 months by 2023.…