Data centre firms say the AI bottleneck is now power and labour

Executives from NTT Data, Brookfield and Infosys say electricity and skilled labour, not chips, now limit how fast AI data centres get built. In Europe the binding constraint is worse, with grid connections in congested markets running to ten years.

The thing slowing the AI buildout is no longer the chips. Executives running some of the world’s largest data centre operations say it is electricity and people.

They spoke at Bloomberg’s New Economy Forum in New Delhi on Tuesday, Bloomberg reported . NTT Data’s chief executive Abhijit Dubey called talent the bottleneck nobody talks about.

European operators said the same in July. A survey of 300 data centre decision-makers in the UK, Ireland and the Nordics put power availability and skills shortages among the leading obstacles .

Dubey put a price on the labour. An electrician in the US now earns about $200,000, he said, and sourcing the right equipment can take as long as 42 weeks.

Europe’s wait is longer. Grid connections in congested markets run to ten years or more , with Amsterdam at about a decade and Frankfurt waiting on upgrades until the 2030s.

Denmark stopped taking bookings. Its grid operator paused new connections in March with roughly 60GW of projects queued against peak demand near 7GW.

On money the panel split from this week’s other big voice. Dubey said capital is not an issue, a day after Broadcom’s chief executive said capital might be the biggest constraint of all.

Demand will outstrip supply past the end of the decade, said Connor Teskey, who runs Brookfield Asset Management. The bottleneck, he said, is who can pull these projects out of the ground.

Teskey also rejected the bubble case, saying most of the infrastructure sits behind long take-or-pay contracts with strong corporate credit. Hours earlier the IMF had called similar revenue commitments wrong-way risk .

Its Global Financial Stability Report counted 14 circular deals since 2023, about $300B of equity and $650B of debt placed into weaker AI firms, securing $1.4T of future revenue promises.

Infosys sees a third risk. Salil Parekh pointed to the backlash in Western markets, and in Scotland the governing party has voted to freeze all new builds .

That resolution counts 24 hyperscale projects at various planning stages, which together would draw more than 1.5 times Scotland’s peak power demand. Ministers have not decided.

Refusals are adding up elsewhere. Dublin turned down a Google data centre over energy, and grassroots opposition blocked $130B of US projects in the first quarter alone.