AI Chip Supply Chain: It Wasn't Logic That's the Bottleneck
# AI Chip Supply Chain: It Wasn't Logic That's the Bottleneck When everyone was worried about not enough AI chips, it turns out the real constraint wasn't the chips themselves—it was the stuff that surrounds them. According to Epoch AI, the four largest AI chip designers consumed roughly 90% of...
AI Chip Supply Chain: It Wasn't Logic That's the Bottleneck
When everyone was worried about not enough AI chips, it turns out the real constraint wasn't the chips themselves—it was the stuff that surrounds them.
According to Epoch AI, the four largest AI chip designers consumed roughly 90% of global advanced packaging and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) supply in 2025. That makes CoWoS packaging and HBM the actual bottlenecks in AI chip production, not the logic dies that everyone was fretting over.
Frontier AI chips like NVIDIA's B200 need three key inputs: advanced logic dies, HBM, and CoWoS advanced packaging, which integrates everything onto a single interposer. While CoWoS and HBM are almost entirely consumed by AI demand, logic fabrication serves a much broader market—smartphones, laptops, automotive—and AI chips consumed only 12% of that supply in 2025.
The implication: if you wanted to slow down AI scaling last year, you didn't need to restrict chip exports. You just needed to choke off packaging and memory.
Epoch drew on its AI Chip Sales hub, chip technical specs, unit costs, and market size data to build the estimates, modeling manufacturing lags and inventory timing for CY2025.
