Everything on Hardware Infrastructure

TSMC and the broader semiconductor industry face a critical shortage of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and lithography equipment, with supply constraints potentially lasting until 2030.

Impact: Limits the speed at which AI labs can scale their training and inference capabilities globally.

— from AI Strategic Shifts: Apple's Leadership Pivot and Infrastructure Bottlenecks · The AI Daily Brief (Formerly The AI Breakdown): Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis· Apr 21, 2026

Compute efficiency is hitting a physical ceiling at the circuitry level, meaning future gains will come from networking multiple computers and optimizing quality per token rather than raw token volume.

Impact: Could lead to an increase in token pricing and a premium on energy-efficient AI inference.

— from Beyond Scale: Specialized AI Agents and the Compute Bottleneck · Dev Interrupted· Apr 21, 2026