IT decision makers face a paradox in 2026. Just as artificial intelligence promises to revolutionize business operations, the infrastructure needed to support those ambitions has grown scarce. This push-pull dynamic is forcing CIOs to stretch and bend their IT strategies for the foreseeable future.
The hardware supply chain is struggling to keep up with demand, impacting availability and prices.
“What’s triggering this is the massive AI build-out that we’re seeing from a handful of very large players, including the hyperscalers,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, President and CEO of Nutanix, during a Morgan Stanley conference in March.
“To the extent that continues over multiple years, that’s gonna continue to put pressure on the supply side.”
Global semiconductor sales grew over 25% in 2025, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). More specifically, sales of advanced computing chips for AI workloads grew nearly 40% in 2025 while memory chips sales rose 34.8% year-over-year. As companies keep investing in AI datacenter buildouts, the SIA predicts overall chip sales will surpass $1 Trillion in 2026, which equates to over 25%.
Balancing supply constraints with AI transformation mandates requires CIOs and IT organizations to make tough decisions.
“Hardware prices could change. Prices go up. Lead times could go up,” Ramaswami said.
Purchase timelines get altered. Price changes hit budgets. IT leaders are responding to supply chain constraints by ordering hardware early to lock in current prices and secure their position in vendor queues. They’re simultaneously pursuing greater infrastructure flexibility through external storage deployments, multi-vendor server sourcing, and public cloud alternatives that allow them to bypass on-premises hardware bottlenecks. Many are also leveraging commercial arrangements with future start dates that enable them to commit to software licenses today while delaying activation until hardware becomes available, according to Ramaswami.
“Our customers are ordering hardware ahead of price increases and leveraging external storage to avoid hardware replacements,” Ramaswam told Yahoo! Finance, describing how Nutanix customers are coping.
“This provides flexibility despite hardware constraints,” he said. “They can try and arbitrate amongst all the hardware providers.”
Despite these challenges, organizations are pushing ahead with their shift to AI. This month, the 2026 Enterprise Cloud Index report showed that 59% of IT executives surveyed expect their organizations to have more than five AI-enabled applications in the next few years. Furthermore, 23% expect to have over 10 AI-enabled applications during that time. Most respondents said those new AI capabilities include generative AI, and agentic AI and autonomous agents. Nearly 60% believe AI agents will improve productivity and efficiency, and could help their organization create new products, services or revenue streams.
Related:
How Kubernetes Catalyzes Enterprise IT
Building Solid Enterprise AI Infrastructure Strategy
How AI is Shaping the Future of Data Storage Strategies
Clouds With Borders: IT Teams Design for Geopatriation
Dartmouth College Powers AI for Its Researchers
Ken Kaplan is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him on X @kenekaplan and LinkedIn.
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