US data center policy clouds AI capacity outlook, MetaAge says

The bottleneck has migrated from fabrication to fulfillment. GPU scarcity is no longer the binding constraint—HBM and CoWoS advanced packaging are the new physical ceilings. MetaAge's signal on material costs and delivery slippage reveals a structural engineering limit in substrates, thermal management, and interconnect density, not a cyclical dip. Technically, the HBM4 qualification window (12-18 months) will manufacture a fresh "memory wall," decoupling effective inference throughput from raw FLOPS growth. Memory makers' pricing leverage is at historic highs. On compliance, the compounding effect of US siting rules, energy allocation, and export controls injects 6-12 months of "regulatory friction" per project; dual-sourcing strategies inflate capex by 15-25%. Strategic positioning: NVIDIA's moat is being eroded on the inference side by custom ASICs (TPU v6, Trainium 2), potentially ceding 20-30% share by 2026. AMD's MI400 weaponizes "availability" as its core differentiator. TSMC's CoWoS-L capacity remains the true gatekeeper. 12-24 month call: The industry pivots from "stack FLOPS" to "intelligence density per watt." Inference efficiency, model distillation, and edge deployment become the dominant narratives. The supply-demand gap will not close—demand fragments across heterogeneous compute, structurally dismantling single-vendor dependency.