An executive working on artificial intelligence infrastructure at Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) recently told employees the company needs to double its compute capacity every six months to meet demand, CNBC reported.
Amin Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, gave a presentation to employees that included a slide on compute capacity, which read “Now we must double every 6 months…. the next 1000x in 4–5 years,” the news outlet reported, citing the presentation. The comments were made at a meeting on Nov. 6.
“The competition in AI infrastructure is the most critical and also the most expensive part of the AI race,” Vahdat said during the meeting.
The search giant needs to “be able to deliver 1,000 times more capability, compute, storage networking for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level,” Vahdat added. “It won’t be easy, but through collaboration and co-design, we’re going to get there.”
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Anat Ashkenazi were also at the meeting and took questions.
One of the questions Pichai took from an employee was about the potential bursting of the AI bubble. Pichai acknowledged the fact that the question is now in the “zeitgeist,” but reiterated his stance that the risk of underinvesting is high.
“I think it’s always difficult during these moments because the risk of underinvesting is pretty high,” Pichai said, according to CNBC. “I actually think for how extraordinary the cloud numbers were, those numbers would have been much better if we had more compute.”
The report comes one day after tech giant Nvidia (NVDA) reported better-than-expected results and guidance. Shares initially rose after the figures were released, and management had a response for several investor concerns. However, the gains evaporated on Thursday amid continued worries about the bursting of the AI bubble.
Alphabet is one of Nvidia’s customers and also uses its own tensor processing units for various applications and services.
Google has not yet responded to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.