In the "AI 2027" article/story, they're talking about next generation models "using 100 times the compute used to train GPT4. Here's a video covering that part of it https://youtu.be/5KVDDfAkRgc?si=TR8XDQmye6O6kkiT&t=169 (the 100x is at 4:38, this video starts where he starts talking compute of GPT3).

So my guess is that what is driving the need is that (speculated) 100x the next major models.