June 28 (Reuters) – Google has placed limits on the use of Meta Inc’s Gemini AI model after the social media company demanded more computing power than rival technology groups could provide, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google told Meta around March that it wouldn’t be able to meet the full Gemini capacity it was looking to buy, the newspaper said, adding that the shortage had halted and delayed some of Meta’s internal AI projects.
Several other Google clients are also affected to a lesser extent, according to the report. According to FT, Meta has been particularly affected as demand for Google’s models is very high.
Reuters could not immediately confirm the report, which cited people familiar with the matter. Google and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside business hours.
Because of the limitations, Meta is encouraging staff to use AI tokens, the unit of measurement for AI usage, more efficiently, the FT report said.
Even as companies continue to spend billions of dollars on chips and data centers, they still struggle to secure enough computing power to support the growing demand for AI services.
Google Cloud’s revenue rose to $20 billion in the first quarter ended March, but CEO Sundar Pichai said computing power constraints hampered further growth and the cloud division’s backlog nearly doubled from the previous quarter.
(Reporting by Abu Sultan in Bengaluru; Editing by William Mallard and Sonali Paul)
