Nomura: Premature to Call Chip Stock Peak, AI Server Demand and Supply Chain Bottleneck Still Driving Investment by Cloud Players

BlockBeats News, July 2nd, Nomura recently stated in a deep-dive semiconductor report that cloud providers will still find it difficult to halt expansion by 2027. The continuous iteration of AI models, growth in inference demand, expansion of data center construction plans, as well as tight supply of storage and advanced packaging, will all continue to drive cloud providers to secure chip, packaging, substrate, storage, and server resources.

Nomura's logic is that AI capital expenditure is not a short-term choice for individual companies, but a competitive pressure among major cloud platforms. As long as companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and others are still competing for AI models, enterprise customers, and inference traffic, they will find it difficult to proactively slow down their infrastructure development. Even with rising costs, pausing could mean losing their platform competitive position.

The report especially mentioned that although TSMC is expanding its CoWoS advanced packaging capacity, small substrate suppliers may become a new bottleneck. In other words, the bottleneck is not only in GPUs, but also in advanced packaging, ABF/substrates, HBM, server assembly, and power infrastructure.

Therefore, Nomura is optimistic about supply chain companies such as TSMC, ASE, Aspeed, MediaTek, GlobalWafers, KYEC, Elite Material, Zhen Ding, among others. Its assessment contrasts with concerns about "AI overheating": the real issue is not disappearing demand, but rather that the supply chain is still insufficient; as long as bottlenecks exist, cloud providers will continue to pay for scarce capacity.