University of Kwazulu-Natal

Why Ibm S Ceo Doesn T Think Current Ai Tech Can Get To Agi

Bonisiwe Shabane
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why ibm s ceo doesn t think current ai tech can get to agi

While giant tech companies like Google and Amazon tout the billions they’re pouring into AI infrastructure, IBM’s CEO doubts their bets will pay off like they think. Arvind Krishna, who has been at the helm of the legacy tech company since 2020, said even a simple calculation reveals there is “no way” tech companies’ massive data center investments make sense. This is in part because data centers require huge amounts of energy and investment, Krishna said on the Decoder podcast. Goldman Sachs estimated earlier this year that the total power usage by the global data center market stood at around 55 gigawatts, of which only a fraction (14%) is dedicated to AI. As demand for AI grows, the power required by the data center market could jump to 84 gigawatts by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs. Yet building out a data center that uses merely one gigawatt costs a fortune—an estimated $80 billion in today’s dollars, according to Krishna.

If a single company commits to building out 20 to 30 gigawatts then that would amount to $1.5 trillion in capital expenditures, Krishna said. That’s an investment about equal to Tesla’s current market cap. All the hyperscalers together could potentially add about 100 gigawatts, he estimated, but that still requires $8 trillion in investment—and the profit needed to balance out that investment is immense. Krishna’s cost model challenges the economics behind multi-gigawatt AI campuses. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna used an appearance on The Verge’s Decoder podcast to question whether the capital spending now underway in pursuit of AGI can ever pay for itself. Krishna said today’s figures for constructing and populating large AI data centers place the industry on a trajectory where roughly $8 trillion of cumulative commitments would require around $800 billion of annual profit simply... The claim was tied directly to assumptions about current hardware, its depreciation, and energy, rather than any solid long-term forecasts, but it comes at a time when we’ve seen several companies one-upping one another... Krishna estimated that filling a one-gigawatt AI facility with compute hardware requires around $80 billion. The issue is that deployments of this scale are moving from the drawing board and into practical planning stages, with leading AI companies proposing deployments with tens of gigawatts — and in some cases,... Krishna said that, taken together, public and private announcements point to roughly one hundred gigawatts of currently planned capacity dedicated to AGI-class workloads.

The debate around digital safety, privacy, and state control over smartphones in India has taken a sharp turn after reports emerged that Apple may refuse to follow a... Toyota is making one of the most significant manufacturing bets in its history as it doubles down on hybrids while much of the U.S. auto industry grapples with... Hundreds of Porsche vehicles across Russia have abruptly stopped working following a widespread collapse of the brand’s satellite-linked Vehicle Tracking System. The glitch has triggered automatic immobilization in... Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. IBM was early, you might argue too early, to AI. Now, CEO Arvind Krishna thinks big bets like Watsonx and quantum computing will start to pay off. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says that, despite the Trump administration’s attacks on globalism, global trade isn’t dead.

In fact, he thinks that the U.S.’s key to growth will be embracing an international exchange of goods. “So, I actually am a firm believer — I think it goes all the way back to the economists who studied global trade in the 1800s — and I think their perspective was, every... “So, if we want to really optimize even for local [growth], you got to have global trade.” Global trade goes hand in hand with allowing overseas talent to flow into the U.S., Krishna said. The administration and its allies have called for increased restrictions on student and H-1B work visas, which they claim put U.S. citizens at a disadvantage.

“We want people to come here and bring their talent with them and apply that talent,” Krishna said. “And we want to develop our own talent as well, but you can’t develop it as well if you’re not bringing the best people from across the world for our people to learn from... So we should be an international talent hub, and we should have policies that go along with that.” During the wide-ranging interview, Krishna touched on not only geopolitics but also AI, which he thinks is a valuable technology — but no panacea.

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While giant tech companies like Google and Amazon tout the billions they’re pouring into AI infrastructure, IBM’s CEO doubts their bets will pay off like they think. Arvind Krishna, who has been at the helm of the legacy tech company since 2020, said even a simple calculation reveals there is “no way” tech companies’ massive data center investments make sense. This is in part because data centers ...

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If a single company commits to building out 20 to 30 gigawatts then that would amount to $1.5 trillion in capital expenditures, Krishna said. That’s an investment about equal to Tesla’s current market cap. All the hyperscalers together could potentially add about 100 gigawatts, he estimated, but that still requires $8 trillion in investment—and the profit needed to balance out that investment is i...

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IBM CEO Arvind Krishna used an appearance on The Verge’s Decoder podcast to question whether the capital spending now underway in pursuit of AGI can ever pay for itself. Krishna said today’s figures for constructing and populating large AI data centers place the industry on a trajectory where roughly $8 trillion of cumulative commitments would require around $800 billion of annual profit simply......

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Posts From This Topic Will Be Added To Your Daily

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. IBM was early, you might argue too early, to AI. Now, CEO Arvind Krishna thinks big bets like Watsonx and quantum computing will start to pay off. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepa...