he talk about AI being a bubble-driven hype cycle has largely stopped. Now the problem is that it can't keep up with demand.

A perfect storm of factors has conspired against the AI industry, turning its compute shortage into an emerging crisis:

• The war in Iran is disrupting tech products: The conflict is snarling global supply chains and threatening to unleash a new wave of inflation. One of the key elements of the semiconductor supply chain, helium, is a victim of the crisis. And that could affect many tech products, including those needed to build AI data centers. A prolonged conflict will continue to impact oil prices, driving inflation in logistics, shipping, and travel needed for the tech ecosystem to thrive.
• AI agents are gobbling up tokens: The boom in AI agents over the past 90 days has triggered insatiable demand for inference, also known as the tokens needed to run AI queries and tasks. The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI's token demand jumped from 6 million per minute in October 2025 to 15 billion per minute in March. Never mind the fact that many of those tokens are being used inefficiently by users and their agents, as OpenAI's Peter Steinberger alluded to this week.
• GPU, memory, and storage are scarce: Even before the recent supply disruptions, the tech industry had been facing a deepening shortage of GPUs, memory chips, and storage drives, all key components needed to build the machines that run AI. The shortages are now leading to price hikes, which could price out startups and leave AI industry giants gobbling up most of the components. Case in point: the Ornn Compute Price Index estimates that the cost of an hour of Nvidia GPU time has increased by 48 percent in the past months alone.

All of this is happening against the backdrop of Anthropic announcing Mythos, its most powerful model ever, while initially limiting access to a small number of partners. And OpenAI is preparing to launch its Spud model, which is also considered a step change, prompting the company to release a policy paper to spark public debate about the AI's impact on jobs and societal well-being.

Anthropic has chalked up its motivation not to release Mythos more broadly to cybersecurity risks, claiming the model is "too powerful." I believe it's also clear that the company does not have the compute to run it.

Our Deeper View

I recently heard directly from an executive at one of the AI frontier labs that every time the company releases a new model with greater capabilities, usage spikes because people can do more with it. Anthropic's Claude has already been buckling under the demand of a new influx of users since its February showdown with the Pentagon. There's no way that it's ready to give users rocket fuel to do more with Mythos. And that puts Anthropic and all of the AI labs in a tricky spot as they prepare to grow in the months ahead. There are no guarantees that the conflict in Iran will be resolved soon, but even if it is, the agent situation and the shortage of key components are likely to continue to limit AI's growth options. What will that mean? I expect we'll be talking about that a lot in the days ahead. You can follow my updates in real-time on Twitter/X.