Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an interview during the 2026 World Economic Forum annual meeting that artificial intelligence needs to have a wider impact or else it risks losing “social permission,” especially given the amount of energy and other resources that AI data centers consume. Nadella made this comment during his talk with Laurance D. Fink, CEO and chairperson of BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, that has been shared on YouTube. The two company heads were talking about AI diffusion, with Fink asking, “Can you describe how this process of diffusion across economies, across companies, across people, and countries? How does that play out?”
“The zeitgeist is a little bit about the admiration for AI in its abstract form or as technology. But I think we, as a global community, have to get to a point where we are using it to do something that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries,” Nadella said. “Otherwise, I don’t think this makes much sense, right? In fact, I would say we will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens, if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors, small and large. And that, to me, is ultimately the goal.”
The rush to build AI infrastructure is putting a strain on many different resources. For example, we’re in the middle of a memory chip shortage because of the massive demand for HBM that AI GPUs require. It’s estimated that data centers will consume 70% of memory chips made this year, with the shortage going beyond RAM modules and SSDs and starting to affect other components and products like GPUs and smartphones.
There’s also the increased demand for electricity, which is causing prices to spike by 36% in some states and wholesale prices to soar by up to 267% over the past 5 years. The high-performance AI processors in data centers also require a lot of water for cooling, with AI data centers reportedly using more water than the amount of bottled water people drank globally in one year. It has gotten to a point that U.S. politicians from both sides of the aisle have taken notice, with Democratic Senators demanding an explanation from big tech companies about their energy usage and President Donald Trump telling AI tech companies to “pay their own way” when it comes to their electricity consumption.
Microsoft is actually taking steps to make its AI data centers more palatable to its neighbors with its “Community-First AI Infrastructure” framework, and OpenAI has also followed suit. However, it is still an open question whether other hyperscalers will follow suit.
Talk of AI bubble
Aside from talking about the impact of AI on people, the two industry leaders also covered the AI bubble. Many industry leaders and institutions are warning about an AI bubble, especially as tech companies are continually pouring money into its development while only seeing limited benefits. “For this not to be a bubble, by definition, it requires that the benefits of this [technology] are much more evenly spread. I mean, I think, a tell-tale sign of if it’s a bubble would be if all we’re talking about are the tech firms,” said the Microsoft chief. “If all we talk about is what’s happening to the technology side, then it’s just purely supply side.”
He then gave an example of how AI tech is being used in the pharmaceutical industry to develop new drugs, wherein it was used to accelerate the clinical trial. Nadella even emphasized that AI wasn’t used to discover the “magical molecule” — instead, it was used for all the other things needed “to make something much more relevant.”
“That’s why I’m much more confident that this is a technology that will, in fact, build on the rails of cloud and mobile, diffuse faster, and bend the productivity curve and bring local surplus and economic growth all around the world — not just economic growth driven by capital expenses.”
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