The HBM Bottleneck: 3 Tech Companies Have Locked Up 85% of the Supply of AI's Scarcest Asset

One of the most significant obstacles in the AI infrastructure market is high bandwidth memory (HBM), with three major tech companies holding 85% of the production capacity for next year: Nvidia, Alphabet, and Advanced Micro Devices. HBM is a specialized type of DRAM that is often paired with AI accelerators to enhance performance and reduce latency. With AI workloads increasingly shifting from training to inference, the demand for HBM has grown exponentially.

However, supply of HBM remains limited due to several factors. While SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron are working to boost their production capacity, they require extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines. These machines are essential for creating advanced logic chips such as GPUs, and are in short supply. ASML, the sole company globally possessing this technology, is expanding its capacity at a rate of approximately 30%.