Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has warned that the artificial intelligence industry is struggling to secure enough computing capacity to keep pace with rising demand, with Google facing constraints that could make it difficult to fulfil customer requirements as far ahead as 2027.

“Today, when you sit and look at anything, everyone is short, not just us, and everyone wishes you had 2x of what you had planned for,” Pichai said in an interview with Alex Kantrowitz on the Big Technology Podcast this week.

Pichai said Google's current computing capacity reflects investment decisions made in 2024, highlighting the difficulty of anticipating demand in a fast-moving industry. He added that securing computing capacity for customers seeking access in 2027 was already proving challenging.

“If today a customer is coming and asking us for compute in '27, that is incredibly difficult to do,” he said.

The comments underscore the infrastructure challenge facing AI companies as they race to develop increasingly capable models and deploy them across consumer and enterprise products. The constraints extend beyond processors to the data centres, electricity supply and supporting infrastructure required to run AI workloads at scale.

Pichai also pushed back against comparisons between the current AI infrastructure boom and previous waves of overinvestment in technologies such as fibre-optic networks. He argued that computing capacity was already being used, with Google facing shortages on a daily basis.

“We are at early stages of the most consequential technology ever. This is not like fibre. It's not dark. We are using it.

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