# Sparse PCA for $p >> n$ solution with Elastic Net

I was reading about the sparse principal component approach by Zou, Hastie and Tibshirani but I do not quite understand how they handle the $$p \gg n$$ case in their paper.

To derive the sparse axis, they use the sparse PCA criterion $$(\hat{A}, \hat{B}) = \operatorname{arg min}_{A, B} \sum_{i=1}^{n} \left|\left|x_i - AB^Tx_i\right|\right|_2^2 + \lambda_2 \sum_{j=1}^{k}\left|\left|\beta_j\right|\right|_2^2 + \sum_{j=1}^k \lambda_{1,j} \left|\left|\beta_j\right|\right|_1$$ $$\text{subject to } A^TA = I_{k \times k}$$

where $$\lambda_{i,j}$$ is the sparsity controlling parameter. Solving this criterion by alternating minimization confronts us with an elastic net problem which is computationally hard in the $$p \gg n$$ case. (Does anyone have a complexity bound for the coordinate descent approach?)

In their paper, they use the fact that if we choose $$\lambda_2 \to \infty$$ there exists an explicit solution to the elastic net problem. However, why would we choose $$\lambda_2 \to \infty$$? In what sense does this still solve the original problem? Doesn't this just result in all my axis being 0 since I increase the penalty to infinity?