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Nokia CEO Discovers Math, Blames Supply Chains


The Nokia CEO's comments underscores continued demand for AI even as top executives debate slowing down the pace of development.

  •   1 min read
Nokia CEO Discovers Math, Blames Supply Chains

The CEO of Nokia just announced that data centers would be built twice as fast if we had twice as many supplies. This falls into the category of observations so obvious they loop back around to being insulting.

Remove the constraints and the thing happens faster. Subtract the obstacles and you get more speed. Take away the problems and suddenly there are fewer problems. Someone greenlit a press statement for this.

Nokia makes networking equipment for these data centers. The CEO wants you to know business would be better if business were better. He'd sell more gear if there were more gear to sell and more places to put that gear. Revolutionary stuff.

The real headline is that executives are still debating whether to slow down AI development while this guy is over here complaining he can't build the buildings fast enough to house the AI nobody can agree we should keep building. That's like arguing about whether to adopt a dog while your neighbor installs a second doghouse because the first one has a waiting list.

Retail traders will read this and think it means AI demand is strong. They'll ignore the part where supply constraints mean Nokia can't actually fulfill that demand. They'll buy calls on infrastructure stocks and feel like geniuses until they remember that twice as fast still means not fast enough, and not fast enough means someone else is eating that revenue.

The lesson here is simple. When a CEO tells you his company would do better in an imaginary world where all the bad things disappeared, he's just describing what a company is. Every business would crush it if we removed the parts that make business hard. I'd be a better analyst if facts didn't exist.

Photo by M. Rennim on Unsplash

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