The Desperate Hunt for AI Computing Power Is Upending Silicon Valley

The Wall Street Journal ^ | Oct. 9, 2026 9:00 pm ET | Kate Clark , Erin Woo , Keach Hagey and Meghan Bobrowsky

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Bitter rivals are forming alliances and executives are having to personally intervene over the scramble for resources to fuel the AI boom

Google really wanted pioneering AI researcher Noam Shazeer back.

The longtime employee left to start his own company but in 2024, Google paid $2.7 billion for him to return to work on cutting-edge projects, including its most powerful AI technology, Gemini.

Even that, though, couldn’t ensure that Shazeer got the computing resources he wanted.

Less than two years later, he sent a note to one of his teams saying that Google had cut what was allocated to them in favor of another project. Shortly thereafter, Shazeer left for rival OpenAI.

Compute, the industry shorthand for computing power, is the lifeblood of the AI boom, and it’s in short supply. Now fights over how to get more of it—and what projects to give priority to—are sending a powerful industry scrambling. Bitter rivals are forming new alliances, such as Elon Musk and Dario Amodei, whose companies worked together to secure computing power. Venture-capital firms are touting access to AI chips to woo startups. And power struggles are more frequent as companies compete in a worldwide treasure hunt for the tech industry’s most coveted resource.

“There’s a big gold rush happening at the moment,” said Evan Conrad, chief executive officer of San Francisco Compute. “It’s hard to fully comprehend the scale.”

Conrad’s company vets data centers and then rents their computing power to AI companies that range from the largest players like Nvidia to small startups like Standard Intelligence. Its chief technology officer, Eric Park, travels the globe in search of computing resources hiding where few else think to look.

In the spring, it was far-flung corners of rural America, where...

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TOPICS: Computers/Internet
KEYWORDS: aitruth; aiworship

[algore]

640k should be enough for anyone.

The key here is optimization.

[chickenlips]

Building an oppressive surveillance state takes resources and hard work.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Remember the days of the mighty 20 MB HDD?

[Dr. Sivana]

The Seagate 225 was the standard desktop workhorse.

I had its big brother, the Seagate 251 (40 MB)

The Seagate 238 was the RLL hardware compression version of the 225(up to 30 MB)

I hated configuring MFM hard drive controllers. (had to run debug in DOS).

When I could afford SCSI, I ran to it.

[ConservativeMind]

I bought both of those Seagates.

RLL was the beat way to increase capacity.

Yes, I also enjoyed SCSI.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

The segmented memory was fun, too, when you tried to write some C or assembly.

[Dr. Sivana]

I am not a programmer, but I always thought that the Intel 808x/80x86 was not the best way to go, and was just an accident of history. The Motorola 680x0 was a better route, at least for about 15 years.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

Notice how "climate change" and the "environment" and "global warming" has jumped off
the front page? The latest money making scam is "AI"—"global warming" be damned.

[Dr. Sivana]

The latest money making scam is "AI"

First "they" say there is no money in AI. Then "they" say there is not enough AI computing power available at any price. The power is being brought on line daily. The new facility I worked on brought a bunch of new nVidia B300s online as soon as they were configured and operational. The amount of computing power at that site is incomprehensible. Like any tool, it can be used for good or evil.

[algore]

I do, actually one of my friends bought a 5mb drive for his apple.

and some years after that my mom had 500mb scsi drives in her machine cause they were much faster than the IDE ones.

today I have a bunch of 24tb sata drives sitting on my shelf for no good reason.

what a difference 30 years makes.

[Jonty30]

I remember when a 5 MB hard drive was the size of a filing cabinet.

[Texas_Jarhead]

haha, that’s good. Gates has always denied saying that.

[Bikkuri]

my first was a massive 12mb hdd for over $500

[minnesota_bound]

They pay 3 cents a kw while the tax payers is paying .25 to .70+ cents a kw.

I regularly see posts at nextdoor.com about electric bills of $2 and over $3 thousand for 2 months for a house that use to be under $500. All from secret deals the data centers get and the electric companies make up for it by hiking the electric rate for the taxpayers.