AI Supply Chain¶
The physical bottleneck stack behind frontier AI compute. jensen-huang says these are what keep him up at night — not algorithms.
The three pinch points¶
- ASML — extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines. Monopoly supplier.
- TSMC — advanced packaging (CoWoS) required for modern GPU + HBM assemblies. Capacity is gated and takes years to add.
- SK Hynix / Samsung / Micron — high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Quality and yield gate model serving economics.
Why it's hard¶
NVIDIA is growing faster than any company in history while accelerating. Aligning ASML → TSMC → HBM → NVIDIA → hyperscaler capex on multi-year lead times, without over- or under-building, is a coordination problem that "informing CEOs" (his verb) is a meaningful part of the job.
Power delivery is the adjacent constraint: if utilities could offer segmented power delivery guarantees ("I can give you X MW by month Y at price Z"), the industry could plan around it the way it plans around fab capacity.