Brookfield Corp. chief executive Bruce Flatt said the artificial intelligence race is already slowing because the industry cannot build data centres and power capacity fast enough to match what AI companies say they need, Bloomberg reported Friday.
Flatt made the remarks at Brookfield’s 2026 Investor Day in New York. “We as an industry can’t build enough,” he said, according to Bloomberg, adding that “we can’t even build a fraction of what everyone thinks they need.”
Brookfield Corp. and Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. said in a Sept. 14 news release that the two companies would hold a joint investor day in New York on Thursday, Sept. 17. The asset management session was scheduled for 12:45 p.m. to 2:45 p.m. Eastern, followed by the Brookfield Corp. session from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., with a live webcast and replay posted to the companies’ investor relations sites.
Bloomberg reported that Flatt framed the constraint as a physical one that predates the safety debate now running through the sector. The news agency noted that Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman have each said in recent days that AI labs should slow the pace of the technology to manage risks that could put advanced models beyond human control. Flatt’s argument, as Bloomberg described it, is separate from that one: the physical capacity required to run the models cannot be built quickly enough, so the technology is slowing regardless.
The comments are a shift in emphasis rather than a reversal. Flatt told CNBC on Aug. 10 that Brookfield cannot build fast enough to keep up with demand for AI infrastructure, describing the same supply shortfall from the demand side. What changed at Thursday’s investor day is the conclusion he drew from it, that the shortfall has become a brake on the technology itself rather than simply a queue of unmet orders.
The question was already live on Wall Street this week. CNBC reported Sept. 15 that investors were weighing the prospect of an AI slowdown on the data centre buildout, with the pace of construction and the financing behind it both under scrutiny.
Brookfield oversees roughly US$1 trillion in assets across real estate, infrastructure, renewable power and private equity, according to Forbes. The firm’s infrastructure and renewable power businesses have been among the more visible private-sector counterparties to the AI buildout, which gives Flatt’s view of the construction pipeline more weight than a purely financial one.
Forbes ranks Flatt at No. 612 on its 2026 billionaires list with a net worth of US$6.8 billion, the bulk of it tied to his Brookfield holdings. He has led the company since 2002.
Neither Brookfield Corp. nor Brookfield Asset Management has issued a separate statement expanding on Flatt’s remarks beyond the investor day materials posted to their investor relations sites.
