Nokia CEO: AI data centers would be going up twice as fast if not for memory-chip and power shortages

Nokia CEO Justin Hotard, the former head of Intel's data-center group, told a CNBC podcast that demand is not what limits the AI build-out; shortages of memory chips and of grid power are, and without them data centers could be built about twice as fast. Nokia's AI and cloud segment doubled year over year to €446M in the second quarter and booked €2.8B of new orders, about half of which the company expects to convert within a year. The comments line up with reports of HBM allocation fights and multi-year grid interconnection queues. For startups renting compute, it means capacity scarcity is being set upstream of the GPU vendors.