“It turns out there's never one constraint. There's always just the latest constraint. And so you have to think about all of them. And as soon as you hit one, there's another one.”
a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Garman is asked where supply constraints on AI infrastructure will be most severe in 2027 and 2028. He says he doesn't expect a single one: once power stops being the bottleneck it might be memory, chip fabrication capacity, networking components or connectors. He credits the idea to a book he read as an undergraduate, The Goal.
Transcript
I don't know that. I am sure that we're one of the bigger purchasers of components out there for sure. And who knows about everyone, but that kind of depends on how you think about them and how you measure. So
that I was leading to is where do you see the constraints being most severe, let's call it 27, 28? And where do you see the constraints easing up?
Yeah. It's funny. So I'll answer this in a roundabout way, but I remember that in undergrad, we actually, this is a long time ago, and I never thought this would be like a useful book that I read, but we read the goal. And the goal, right? And so it turns out there's never one constraint. There's always just the latest constraint. And so you have to think about all of them. And as soon as you hit one, there's another one, right? And so, you know, what do you just like, what is the constraint that's going to happen in 2028? Like, I actually don't think there will be one. I think it's like every month for us, it's do you have enough power? And then as soon as power is no longer the constraint, you know, it might be memory. It might be TSMC capacity. It might be, you know, HBM. It might be networking components. It could be, you know, there's a blip somewhere in the supply chain and like, you know, connectors or whatever it is, right? At some point, you have to think about all of those pieces. And it's, you know, it's, it's not also the kind of where they happen matters too. You know, so it's, it may be like, hey, we have a ton of power in Indonesia, but we don't have enough in Germany. Right. And so you think about kind of where in the world you want that capacity too, because it turns out that not everything is totally fungible. Some is and some's not. But maybe disk drives, it might be SSDs. It might like we think about every single component and we have, you know, tens, hundreds of thousands of components all that we track and think about. And some we rely on our, you know, our suppliers to manage. Some we direct, much of it we directly manage. And yeah, we have a whole team that does that and they're fantastic. I think they're industry leading. And we kind of, we saw this problem coming probably a decade ago and really started not just thinking about, okay, how many servers do we need to track, but just thinking all the way through the supply chain, you know, four tiers, five tiers down, what is the component that could cause an issue for us and making sure that we had kind of guaranteed supply on that. If you think if you remember, I don't remember when this was, it was over a decade ago when there was like the floods in Thailand and no one had disk drives anymore. And so that was this
drive crisis, and then there was memory crisis.
Exactly. And so, you know, it's like, I think we think through all of those things. And so we also think about where's their diversification in manufacturing, like all of those kind of pieces we try to work through. And we're never going to be perfect on it, but there's always a different supply constraint.
Yeah. So obviously there's a lot of wide-ranging debate about data centers. Right. And it's clear that folks like us where we stand, but do you think as an industry, we have not done a good job of explaining why data centers are good for America generally in the world. But how do you, what's the internal talk? Yeah. Amongst Andy's team, on how do we deal with this? Yeah.
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