AI TRENDS | AI-Driven Price Surge Reshapes Semiconductor Value Distribution, Report Says

According to Jin10, a research report by Taihaitong Securities on May 15 states that the current AI-driven price surge across the entire industry chain is reshaping the value distribution in the semiconductor sector. The report suggests that upstream segments with core barriers will benefit the most, recommending attention to major memory companies and advanced process foundries. Additionally, it highlights the importance of focusing on core material segments with expanding supply-demand gaps and equipment manufacturers accelerating domestic substitution. Lastly, it advises prioritizing leading cloud providers with premium computing power capabilities. The inflation in the AI industry chain has spread from upstream core hardware to the entire midstream and downstream industry chain, forming a systemic cost transmission. The evolution of AI Agents from 'chatting' to 'acting' is expected to initiate the next round of industry chain inflation cycle. The implementation of Agents is projected to exponentially increase Token consumption (growing over 300 times from 2024 to 2025), with the backend computation triggered by a single user command being several times higher than ordinary chatting. This task-oriented continuous invocation will significantly increase inference load, leading to an exponential growth in demand for AI accelerators for HBM. However, the expansion of HBM capacity is constrained by the 'one-to-three' wafer consumption and low yield bottlenecks, with supply release expected only by 2027-2028. The supply-demand contradiction is anticipated to intensify, likely triggering a new round of resource competition and price increases across the entire industry chain.