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SemiAnalysis: Nvidia and memory high margins face 2028 a changing landscape,AI with infrastructure constrained by financing and supply chains
BlockBeats reports that October 25, SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel and Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon recently noted that AI infrastructure investment still has room to grow, but faces the dual challenges of rising financing costs and constrained supply chains. U.S. 10-year Treasury yields surpassed 5%, while yields on unsecured bonds issued by some emerging cloud service providers approached 15%. Non-hyperscale cloud providers, which account for nearly half of construction demand, often lack sufficient balance-sheet support. Projects without long-term purchase commitments (offtake agreement) are finding it increasingly difficult to secure funding, making financing capacity a key dividing line in AI expansion. Meanwhile, capacity for substrates,HBM, optical interconnect components, and clean rooms all face bottlenecks that are difficult to resolve in the short term. Producing the same capacity of HBM requires approximately DDR5 3 to 4 times as many wafers; new clean rooms will gradually come online only in 2027. By contrast, power shortages can be partially mitigated through on-site gas turbines, fuel cells, and other means.
Regarding the core industrial chain, the two analysts warned of a potential turning point in 2028. Nvidia currently continues to support high prices through sustained performance improvements, but Google TPU, Amazon Trainium, and OpenAI’s in-house chip initiatives are providing large customers with alternatives and strengthening their bargaining power. Even if Nvidia’s revenue continues to grow, its market share and profit margins may not rise in tandem. In the memory industry, current HBM gross margins are as high as 88%to 90%, but the market has not assigned an extremely high valuation, with the core concern being the concentrated release of new capacity after 2028. If capacity expansion outpaces incremental demand at that time, compounded by slowing AI demand growth, current high prices and high profits will face a reversal. On the enterprise side, most companies will prefer to purchase Token through cloud services rather than build their own computing capacity, meaning that future demand for AI infrastructure will depend heavily on the utilization of inference services.
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