Transcript from an interview with Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella to celebrate 50 years of MSFT(Friday April 4)
Nadella: What we are really supplying is intelligence. It started in 1975 with Bill and software was the thing. And today nobody is going to get up and say, hey, we need less of it. I need more of it and I need it daily. One thing is certain, the world needs more compute in the future. We will adjust to the geopolitical shifts and see how that shakes out.(Nadella). Bill Gates- I’d like to say that the biggest trend in the world today, way beyond any political shifts is the arrival of AI. We just turned 50 as a company but the next decade will probably be the most profound. Asked about potential over supply of AI compute, Nadella: Do we have to be matched up to it, perfect matching of demand and supply every second? No. So is this something we are absolutely committed to to building our data centres across 60 regions? We are absolutely going to do this. Sure there are always adjustments.
Steve Ballmer: There is a bright future in intelligence and the biggest mistake we could make is to slow investment due to a short term hiccup. Bill Gates: you will always go through periods of having a bit too much supply but over the next 10 years you will probably find we are always going to be in a shortage vs demand so what is key is having a large capital budget to maintain the investment build out.
Nadella: Heres the interesting thing. We have found the thing (AI) I am not looking for any other things. Intelligence will power everything . I am building our infrastructure to support the need in the future. The need from a robotics company, an autonomous driving company, a medical research and drug company.