AI Memory Shortage Locked Through 2030: Computex 2026 Brings Agent Economy, HBM Crisis - Tech Times

At the 2026 Computex trade show, the global AI chip industry is facing a severe shortage of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), with the situation expected to persist until at least 2030. SK Hynix Chairman C... Read original →

The HBM shortage has evolved from a capacity crunch into a systemic technical bottleneck. CoWoS packaging tightly coupled with TSMC’s 3nm/2nm logic nodes makes the foundry the de facto gatekeeper of AI compute infrastructure, while HBM4E and iHBM’s stringent TSV yield requirements lock out all but SK Hynix and Samsung. Export controls from the U.S., Japan, and the Netherlands on EUV and hybrid bonding tools are inflating capex risks for memory makers expanding capacity. Samsung’s aggressive bet on 2nm-based HBM5 aims to overturn SK Hynix’s HBM3E dominance, yet its thermal solution remains unqualified by NVIDIA. Over the next 18 months, HBM pricing will stay elevated, siphoning DDR5 wafer allocation and triggering hidden inflation in consumer memory markets. This scarcity is less about supply-demand imbalance and more about who controls the AI hardware stack—and thus sets the rules for the next computing era.