Musk and Pichai flag compute shortage as Griffin warns of price collapse

On October 21, 2026, Wallstreetcn published a report that set out two competing views of AI compute supply and demand, one from Silicon Valley and one from Wall Street. According to the report, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk used the company's latest quarterly earnings call to lay out his most aggressive compute expansion plan to date: online compute is expected to reach 2.5 to 3GW by the end of 2026, with another 10GW added in 2027. He framed the guidance by saying he would be surprised if online compute at that point came in below 13GW. In his description of the spot market, every hyperscale cloud provider and dozens of smaller companies are competing hard to rent more compute, and if the company said yes to all of them, its capacity could be rented out several times over. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was also cited as publicly confirming that it is extremely difficult for customers to lock in 2027 compute today, and that the whole industry wants twice the capacity it originally planned.

Against that view, Citadel founder Ken Griffin warned in a Bloomberg interview that GPUs are highly similar to airlines: marginal operating costs are very low, so once supply outruns demand, spot rental prices will fall in free fall. He added that the market is shifting from thematic buying toward genuine fundamental research, and that this test has only just begun. The report does not resolve the disagreement or describe any later developments, and stops at the two sides' respective positions.