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The tech industry would build data centers twice as fast without the supply constraints they face, the CEO of Nokia told CNBC, underscoring continued demand for AI even as top executives debate slowing down the pace of development.
"I don't think you can say in any manner we're overbuilding today because reality is that if we could build 2x faster, our customers could build 2x faster, they probably would," Justin Hotard told CNBC's "The Tech Download" podcast.
"So that gives me confidence that we're still in the early days" of the AI buildout, Hotard added.
Shortages of key memory chips and energy are among the supply constraints facing the sector.
Nokia, one of the world's biggest telecommunications equipment makers, has pivoted to become a key player within the AI infrastructure space. It sells the technology required to connect racks of chips within data centers as well as technology that interconnects data centers across different locations.
Nokia's growing role as a "picks and shovels" player in the AI boom appears to have won over investors, with the stock up around 130% over the past year.
Nokia 1-year stock chart. But there's been continued debate over whether the industry is building data centers too fast and whether demand will be there to sustain it.
Investments in the AI buildout from data centers to chips and related infrastructure will total $10.3 trillion from 2025 to 2032 — an average of 3.63% of U.S. gross domestic product per year, according to research presented at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.
Companies are using debt, joint ventures and other complex financing mechanisms to raise investment for these projects, which depend on sustained demand for AI services over the long term.
Concerns about the pace of the AI buildout were exacerbated by safety worries sparked by an Anthropic researcher's warnings on the existential threat of the technology, which prompted the company's CEO Dario Amodei to call for a slowdown in the development of the most advanced models.
That sparked a knee-jerk sell off in AI-related stocks last month.
Hotard said that demand for AI is not just predicated on frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI releasing new models.
"I think the reality is that we're even where we are today is so early in the deployment, and the power of these models is so massive that there's a lot of there's a lot of demand to run in just deploying," Hotard said.
"Even if we didn't have another frontier model released in the next three years, we could probably make tremendous progress just deploying the technology that's there today."
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