Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company doesn’t have enough electricity to power all its AI GPUs, underscoring one of the biggest challenges in the current AI boom: energy supply. Speaking on the Bg2 Pod with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nadella explained that the problem isn’t too many chips but too little power to run them, according to Tom’s Hardware, who summarized the interview.
“The biggest issue we are now having is not a compute glut, but it’s power,” Nadella said. “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.”
By “shells,” Nadella was referring to unfinished data center buildings — empty facilities that lack the necessary infrastructure, such as power and cooling, to host and run GPUs at scale. The shortage of available power has become a growing concern across the tech industry as companies like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI race to expand AI infrastructure.
Tom’s Hardware writes that Altman added that future consumer devices could one day run advanced AI models locally. “Someday, we will make a[n] incredible consumer device that can run a GPT-5 or GPT-6-capable model completely locally at a low power draw,” he said.
Their comments highlight a key tension in the AI sector: while hardware and model development are progressing rapidly, the physical and energy infrastructure needed to support them is lagging behind. Analysts warn that unless power generation and data center capacity scale up, the AI industry could face serious slowdowns — or even a correction — in the coming years.
Watch the full sitdown here:
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