Google tech guru Urs Hölzle explained the company’s plan to beat one of the oldest laws of technology

For the last few years, there’s been increasing evidence that we’re reaching the limits of Moore’s Law, the prediction made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 that computing power will double ever two years or so.

That’s a potentially huge problem for companies like Google, which needs ever more computing brawn to power its various web services, even as it looks to next-generation problems like artificial intelligence.

On stage at the Structure conference on Tuesday, Google’s 8th employee and all-around tech guru Urs Hölzle explained the steps Google is taking to circumvent the limits of Moore’s Law — and why he thinks Google Cloud can serve as a kind of an escape hatch for businesses struggling with the same issue. 

“Moore’s Law is slowing down for a number of reasons,”  Hölzle says. “That is a big problem for us internally, but it’s a much bigger problem for the IT space overall.”

It’s a well-timed message, as Google redoubles its efforts to topple Amazon’s massive lead on the cloud computing market. In fact, almost exactly a year ago at last year’s Structure, Hölzle said that he thought cloud computing could eventually generate more revenue for Google than the advertising business which currently provides the majority of revenue.

Deceleration

Essentially, Hölzle says, as Moore’s Law slows down, it means that IT departments are seeing their costs go up: As companies come to depend more on their computing infrastructure, and as they look to do heavy-duty analysis on their business data, the IT departments need more servers just to meet demand.