Eric Schmidt: AI will hit a money wall before a power wall — $50B per gigawatt adds up fast
rohanpaul_ai · x · 2026-10-12
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argues AI's real limit is cash, not energy, echoing the same week's warnings from Broadcom and Intel CEOs that capital is the binding constraint.
- At roughly $50B per gigawatt, 10 gigawatts of data centers costs half a trillion dollars; very few companies—or countries—can hand an industry a trillion dollars of capital. He named China as one of the few that could, and said he intends to find out whether it is.
- At 6% interest, a trillion dollars of debt costs $60B a year; "perf per watt had a good run," but financing cost is now the core constraint.
The remarks align with Hock Tan and Lip-Bu Tan's view that compute demand will outstrip supply into 2029–2030 while capital becomes the bottleneck.
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