Eric Schmidt: AI will hit a money wall before a power wall — $50B per gigawatt
Aiden_Tech_Ai · x · 2026-10-14
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argues the real constraint on AI is cash, not energy: at roughly $50B per gigawatt, 10 GW costs half a trillion dollars, and the industry ultimately needs about a trillion dollars of capital. At 6% interest, a trillion in debt costs $60B a year.
He doubts many companies or countries can fund this — China possibly could, US capital markets can borrow at that scale, while Europe cannot, which it resents.
Related event: Broadcom, Schmidt Warn Capital—Not Chips—Is AI's Real Bottleneck(4 posts)→
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