Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sat at an interview where he outlined the company’s plan for artificial intelligence, surprising some in the space in an hour-long session with Dwarkesh Patel. Nadella talked about how AI's impact should be measured, the exponential growth for compute demand, its practical applications, and how it will affect humans — and Microsoft’s recent quantum breakthrough. However, one of the biggest revelations in the interview was his approach to building more hardware for AI.
Nadella says that Microsoft will still need to build compute that can “actually help me not only train the next big model but also serve the next big model.” However, he also said that “there will be an overbuild” and that “it’s not just companies deploying, countries are going to deploy capital”. The Microsoft CEO said that even though he builds a lot, he also plans to lease a lot of compute. “I am thrilled that I’m going to be leasing a lot of capacity in ’27, ’28,” Nadella said. “Because I look at the builds, and I’m saying, ‘This is fantastic.’ The only thing that’s going to happen with all the compute build is the prices are going to come down.”
