SILICON VALLEY — The founder of GMI Cloud, one of Nvidia's seven neocloud partners, identified electricity as the biggest bottleneck in artificial intelligence and said the company will expand its business in Asia to address it. Political and social conflict over securing power is intensifying in the United States, while Asian countries are moving quickly to build sovereign AI capabilities.
Alex Yeh (pictured), chief executive of GMI Cloud, said in an interview with The Seoul Economic Daily at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California, on the 5th that "power is the real bottleneck, beyond high-bandwidth memory."
GMI Cloud is one of seven partners to which Nvidia supplies its latest AI infrastructure, giving it priority access to the chipmaker's newest graphics processing units. It sits alongside major players including SoftBank, Nebius and Lambda. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang singled out the company in his keynote address at GTC Taipei in June, saying "GMI is in Taiwan." Unlike hyperscalers that offer general-purpose cloud services, neoclouds specialize in providing the GPUs needed for AI computing.
"You can get HBM on the spot market if you pay twice the price, but if power is short, there is nothing you can do no matter how much money you have," Yeh said. Hardware such as HBM can be secured at a premium however severe the shortage, he said, but electricity is an entirely different resource because the logic of supply and demand does not apply. Transformers and transmission infrastructure are required to deliver power, and even building a plant independently is difficult because permits run into opposition from local communities and politicians.
"We are building bases in the United States and Asia at the same time to secure power," Yeh said. "In the U.S., bottlenecks emerge in the supply chain because of data center disputes and political issues, but in Asia these are relatively less severe." He said that while peer companies are centered on the U.S. or Europe, GMI operates large AI data centers in both the U.S. and Asia and can raise funds through Japan at half the cost of its competitors.
Yeh founded a data center company for bitcoin mining in the U.S. in 2021 and grew it into the largest company in Arkansas, then shifted to AI data centers in 2023, just after the momentum created by OpenAI's ChatGPT. The company now operates AI data centers in Thailand and Malaysia as well as the U.S., and is expanding facilities in Taiwan and Japan. Taiwan is a core country in the semiconductor industry, home to TSMC, the world's largest foundry, and to MediaTek and Realtek, the island's leading fabless chip designers. Yeh is also the son of Yeh Chia-wen, chairman of Hong Yi International and a co-founder of Realtek. Taiwanese media have cited that connection as the reason the company can quickly form stable partnerships with firms there.
Yeh argued that the concept of GDP, which refers to gross domestic product, must be rewritten. "The new GDP is the sum of GPU, Data and Power," he said, adding that "combining these three gives you infinite intelligence."
Another reason for his focus on Asia is that governments across the region are building power grids and data centers to realize sovereign AI. GMI Cloud announced a $500 million data center construction plan in Taiwan last November, and at GTC 2026, Nvidia's largest annual event held in March, it said it would build a 1-gigawatt AI factory in Kagoshima through a public-private partnership in Japan at a cost of $12 billion. The latest Nvidia GPUs to be supplied to the two data centers total about 9,000 units.
He also described South Korea as an important market, citing national sovereign AI projects such as the Honam semiconductor cluster. GMI Cloud secured $668 million in a funding round led by its investor ARCHIV late last month, with Korean companies including KB Investment, Kyobo Life Insurance and KT taking part alongside Nvidia. "Korea, home to Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, is part of the world's best AI supply chain, and the government is actively pursuing sovereign AI policies," Yeh said. "Korea is a country that moves aggressively and quickly, and I have respect for Korean companies and the Korean people."