Dylan Patel on CPU shortage
From Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis): The Datacenter in 2026: CPUs, RL Environments & Agent-Driven Workloads · · Daytona and SemiAnalysis
“Over the last six months we've seen the entire cloud market run out of CPUs right. I don't know if you folks have interacted with GitHub a lot recently but it's really unstable. Yeah. So we've been checking GitHub's stats on how often is it down how often does it fail to commit whatever right it's terrible. And that's because Microsoft sold all their CPUs that they had spare to other people right either internal use for their lab but not really more so like external labs they've signed deals with Anthropic and OpenAI. And so they just have like no CPUs left right.”
On , Dylan Patel, Founder, CEO, and Chief Analyst at SemiAnalysis, spoke about CPU shortage during Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis): The Datacenter in 2026: CPUs, RL Environments & Agent-Driven Workloads on Daytona and SemiAnalysis.
About Dylan Patel
Dylan Patel, founder and CEO of SemiAnalysis, has been speaking at several industry events in early 2026 about AI infrastructure, benchmarking, and market dynamics. At an Aria Networks launch event in April, Patel stated that AI inference demand has grown so rapidly that the rental price of three-year-old H100 GPUs has risen from around $160-170 per hour to over $240 per hour in six months, with no spare capacity available. He also discussed the InferenceX project, which he described as a free and open-source benchmarking effort with over a thousand GPUs donated by companies including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Nvidia. In a March interview at the Daytona Compute Conference, Patel said that hyperscalers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft were slow to move into AI, creating an opportunity for "NeoClouds" that could skip complex legacy software. He also noted that the entire cloud market had run out of CPUs, with Amazon's CPU server installations tripling year-over-year. In an April interview with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Patel said his firm's AI token spend had skyrocketed from tens of thousands of dollars annually to $7 million, driven by non-technical staff using AI for coding. He stated that "ideas are cheap and plentiful but execution is very easy," and warned that people who do not use more tokens, generate value from them, and capture that value will "never escape the permanent underclass." Patel also predicted a "large scale protest against Anthropic and AI," citing a Pew survey that he said showed AI is less popular than politicians. In a panel at the Beyond Summit, Patel asserted that vendor benchmark claims are "lies, impossible to achieve," and that "if you're not pissing off people with your benchmark, then you're not testing something useful."