In 2026, a global shortage of computing power swept across the entire AI supply chain, from chips and cloud services to servers and data-centre components. Companies tied to computing infrastructure reached new highs in global capital markets. Both investors and industry insiders increasingly shared the same judgment: this was not a cyclical shortage, but rather an early signal of a new industrial transformation.
For the past two decades, the dominant assumption had been that computing power would only become cheaper over time. In 2026, that logic appeared to break down, at least temporarily. The global computing-power supply chain entered a state of comprehensive shortage — from GPUs, CPUs and HBM used in servers, to optical modules, copper interconnects, high-speed switches, electricity and liquid-cooling systems in data centres. Even cloud-computing capacity and token resources became constrained.
The ripple effects soon became visible. Chips and servers rose in price; cloud services became more expensive; smartphones and PCs also saw price increases as they absorbed higher chip and memory costs. At the core of this latest wave of shortages and price hikes was a reversal in the balance between supply and demand.
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