Eric Schmidt: AI may hit a money wall before a power wall — $1T capital needed
rohanpaul_ai · x · 2026-09-11
Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt argues AI may hit a money wall before a power wall: at $50bn per gigawatt, 10 GW costs half a trillion dollars, and the industry needs roughly $1 trillion in capital that very few companies or countries can muster. At 6%, a trillion in debt costs $60B a year. He says US capital markets can borrow at this scale, Europe cannot, and China certainly could — he intends to find out if it is.
Related event: Eric Schmidt: AI's Real Bottleneck Is Capital, Not Power(2 posts)→
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