AI chip executives say demand is 'almost unlimited' even as companies get pickier about costs

Key points

• Pat Gelsinger, former Intel CEO, told CNBC this week he considers AI demand "almost unlimited", limited only by available energy.
• Nebius, a company building Nvidia-powered data centres, says it cannot fulfil current customer demand and has not been able to for some time.
• Cerebras Systems CEO Andrew Feldman called Meta and xAI selling spare computing capacity a "unique" case, not a sign of industry-wide oversupply.
• Lumentum, which makes optical networking hardware for data centres, says its products are sold out through to 2030.
• Enterprises are shifting from encouraging maximum AI use to asking what they actually get back for the money spent.

Chip stocks have swung sharply in recent weeks. The straightforward investor question underneath all of it: is appetite for AI actually slowing?

Several company leaders say no. Speaking to CNBC this week, they argued that demand for computing power is still running well ahead of what the industry can supply.

"What we're experiencing in terms of demand is extraordinary. There's much more demand than we're able to fulfil," said Marc Boroditsky, chief revenue officer at Nebius, a company building data centres packed with Nvidia GPUs (the specialised chips that do the heavy number-crunching AI needs). We reported on 14 July how Nebius secured a billion-dollar compute deal with Reflection AI, a sign of how fast Nebius has been stacking commitments.

Pat Gelsinger, former Intel CEO and now a general partner at Playground Global, was blunter: "I somewhat think of AI demand as almost unlimited." More intelligence applied to any business problem tends to produce more economic value, he said, making energy supply "the only real limiter."

Is the industry building too much?

No, according to most executives who spoke up this week. Concern started when Meta announced it would sell spare AI computing capacity it was not using, and Elon Musk's xAI did the same. To some investors, that looked like a glut.

Cerebras Systems CEO Andrew Feldman pushed back. Meta and xAI are unusual cases. "For the industry as a whole, the demand for compute far outstrips available capacity," he told CNBC.

Lumentum, whose stock has risen roughly 600 percent in the past twelve months, offers the sharpest illustration. CEO Michael Hurlston told CNBC the company's optical connectivity products are already spoken for through 2030 and Lumentum is building capacity as fast as it can to keep pace.

Should enterprises keep spending?

For a period, many companies told employees to use AI tools freely, measuring success by volume rather than results. Boroditsky at Nebius called this "tokenmaxxing", where a token is the basic unit of text that a large language model (the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT) processes.

That phase is ending. Finance directors are pressing for proof that AI spending produces real returns, a shift executives describe as moving toward "valuemaxxing." On 14 July we covered Meta's Adam Mosseri predicting that per-engineer AI spending caps would become a standard corporate line item, which fits exactly the pattern Boroditsky is now describing.

Feldman offered a practical frame. Not every task needs the most powerful model available. "You don't need a giant bus to go to the grocery store," he told CNBC. Simpler tasks will move to cheaper models; harder problems stay with the expensive frontier systems.

For anyone running AI budgets right now, that means the question has quietly changed. It's no longer "are we using enough AI?" It's "is this particular tool earning its keep?" That shift, not the supply constraints, is what will actually reshape spending over the next twelve months.