Ken Kaplan

The effects reach well past the server rack, according to McDowell. He noted that the latest MacBook laptops are carrying five-month lead times due to memory constraints, and some vendors are issuing price quotes valid for only 10 days because the market is shifting that fast. The root cause is economically rational, even if the consequences are disruptive.

"This is people who run retail or finance or whatever at the edge locations, and they're building applications because AI allows for these applications to be created with natural language. You don't have to know how to code." He sees the enterprise software boosting productivity but the guardrails have not kept pace.

In a July 2026 presentation highlighting the ripple effects of the artificial intelligence boom, AMD CEO Lisa Su pointed to a surge in the data center CPU total addressable market (TAM) from roughly $26 billion in 2025 to nearly $220 billion by 2030. This compound annual growth rate (CAGR) exceeding 50 percent points to a shift in how robustly cloud service providers and enterprise data centers are building their IT infrastructure.