The artificial intelligence gold rush is rapidly drying up the supply of computing power, causing consternation among power users and forcing companies to scuttle products.
Companies have been scrambling to secure the availability of computing capacity needed to serve a growing base of customers who are also significantly increasing their AI use.
Hourly rental prices for GPUs have surged since the fall, and companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are experiencing frequent outages due to the capacity crunch.
Anthropic has begun metering computing supply to users during peak hours, but the rollout has been marred by customers who have complained that they are reaching the limit far too quickly.
CoreWeave, one of the largest publicly traded AI cloud companies, raised prices by more than 20% and started asking smaller customers to sign contracts committing them to use the company's services for at least three years.
The capacity crunch is a warning sign for the AI boom, as it may limit the utility of powerful new AI tools just as massive amounts of users have begun to rely on them to boost productivity.
