
AI is confronting a supply-chain crunch
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.A new craze has taken hold of Silicon Valley in recent months. Techies looking to prove they are among the vanguard of artificial-intelligence adoption have taken to “tokenmaxxing”, competing against one another to burn through the most tokens (as the chunks of text processed by AI models are known). Between January and March, the weekly tokens processed by OpenRouter, a marketplace for accessing models, quadrupled.As demand for AI soars, the industry behind it is struggling to keep up.
In March Anthropic, an AI lab whose models are popular with businesses, began throttling access to its tools at busy times, and has since been altering its subscription plans seemingly in a bid to curb usage. In April its service has experienced outages averaging around 30 minutes per day. And it is not alone.
In March OpenAI, a rival, abruptly shut Sora, its video-generation tool, to redirect scarce computing power toward more lucrative uses. On April 20th GitHub, a coding-collaboration site owned by Microsoft, stopped accepting new subscriptions for its programming bot.The industry’s response has been to pour ever larger sums of money into new infrastructure. On April 20th Anthropic announced a $100bn partnership with Amazon to secure up to five gigawatts (GW) of server capacity, with nearly a fifth due to come online by the end of the year.
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