How Long Will AI Chip Supply Stay Constrained?

Rene Haas says the constrained environment for AI chips lasts three to five years at least, so long as the Transformer is the unit of energy for AI training and AI inference. By design, that work is very compute intensive and very memory intensive.

Young companies building AI chips are getting large funding and bringing innovative designs into an industry where capital requirements are massive. Relationships with memory vendors and substrate vendors are critical, along with access to a three nanometer line, a six nanometer line, and an advanced packaging line. The constraint does not stop in 12 months and does not stop in 24 months.

Heavy compute and memory demand drives a need for supply chain skill. People with great ideas on chip design still need a lot of other things to get access to capital and wafers.