United States: Zuckerberg says energy constraints are hindering AI data center buildout

Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that energy constraints have become the largest blockers to building out AI data centers as he echoed industry commentary on the challenges of building larger and larger data centers.

"Over the last few years, there's been this issue of GPU production," he said. "Even companies that had the money to pay for the GPUs couldn't necessarily get as many as they wanted because of all these supply constraints. Now I think that's getting less, and you're seeing a bunch of companies thinking 'wow we should really just invest a lot of money in building out these things.' I think that will go [on] for some period of time."

With AI models requiring ever greater investment to improve "there is a capital question of at what point it stops being worth it to put the capital in," Zuckerberg said. "But I actually think that, before we run into that, we're going to run into energy constraints."

He added: "If we wanted to stand up some massive facility, to power that is a very long-term project. I think [some people will] do it, but I don't think this is something that can be quite as magical as 'you get a level of AI, get a bunch of capital, and put it in [a big data center].'"