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The AI boom has already been responsible for soaring demand and subsequent shortages in the areas of GPUs, computer memory, storage, both spinning and solid-state, electrical power, water, and networking equipment. Now, according to Saint-Gobain CEO Benoit Bazin, the industry's latest bottleneck may be the people needed to build the data centers themselves. Bazin only mentioned it in passing during his Bloomberg Television appearance, but his comments point toward what is becoming an increasingly important challenge for the AI infrastructure boom.When asked by Bloomberg TV whether demand for data center construction was slowing, Bazin said activity remains strong, but then identified labor as one of the industry's key bottlenecks. The executive, whose company supplies construction materials and building products used in hundreds of data center projects, argued that labor shortages are already affecting projects in North America and are beginning to emerge in Europe as well.While Bazin's other responses largely focused on Saint-Gobain's products and energy-efficiency initiatives, the CEO's remarks echo a growing concern that has surfaced across the data center industry over the past year. The global race to build new computing infrastructure has hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Oracle collectively committing hundreds of billions of dollars toward new facilities, but constructing a modern AI data center requires far more than just money.
