Behind the Curtain: AI's ominous scarcity crisis

Top AI executives tell us they're racing to overcome old-fashioned shortages — electricity, computing power, chips, data and engineering talent — to keep improving and deploying their world-changing technology.

Why it matters: This scarcity crisis is among the top threats to America building out AI at scale, and maintaining its edge over China on the large-language models that power AI tools.

It takes an insane amount of data, then awesome programming intelligence — human technologists — to create human-like AI. But that's just table stakes.

It then takes an insane amount of compute power to will their data and work into existence — then a mind-blowing amount of actual energy to make it all happen. We're short on all of it.