Data centre demand to outstrip supply as AI usage grows, say experts

NTT Data and Brookfield executives expect strong data centre demand amid rising AI adoption, but warn that power infrastructure, skilled talent and capacity constraints pose challenges

Electricity grid capacity, energy storage and conversion, and the talent needed to run data centres remain the biggest bottlenecks to expanding data centres globally and in India, Abhijit Dubey, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of NTT Data, said on Tuesday.

 

“The biggest bottleneck nobody talks about is the hidden bottleneck of talent. So, if you think about electricians, skilled technicians, design, construction... their compensation today is more than most of the white-collar jobs,” Dubey said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum 2026 here.

 

There was, however, no dearth of demand for new data centres or even the capital to invest in the sector, he said.

 

The narrative of the demand for artificial intelligence (AI), the compute, capacity, the energy and supply chain for AI being fragile is misplaced, and not connected to ground realities, said Connor Teskey, the CEO of Brookfield Asset Management.

 

“We hear about a more efficient model, and people worry about the demand picture, or we hear about one data centre being released and people worry about the demand picture. The demand so overwhelms supply at this point that there is going to be a supply-demand imbalance through the end of this decade and probably far beyond that,” Teskey said.

 

Dubey and Teskey were part of a panel discussion that also included Infosys CEO and Managing Director (MD) Salil Parekh and Sajiv Ahuja, chairman and CEO of Tillman Global Holdings.

 

Responding to a question on the data centre capacity buildout, Parekh, however, said that as semiconductor chips were "massively expensive" and facing tremendous competition, it was unclear how long the data centre capacity being built would remain useful.

 

“Today the demand is fantastic, but these are some of the risks that could play out," Parekh said.

 

A second risk, he said, was the backlash against such massive build-out, and that the social response, especially in Western markets, needed to be balanced with the geography’s economic drivers.

 

AI services are growing at a double-digit rate sequentially and are likely to drive almost half of Infosys' work in two to three years, Parekh said.

 

"It is growing at a fantastic pace. If you extrapolate that by a few quarters, you already start to see that's 20-30 per cent of our work in a few quarters, and maybe in two or three years, almost half of our work," he said.