Berenberg Senior Analyst: The First True Chip Super Cycle Is Coming, and 'Bottleneck' Is the Wealth-Creation Machine

BlockBeats News, June 21st. Bernstein's star chip analyst Stacy Rasgon recently stated that this is the first true semiconductor supercycle he has witnessed in his 18 years in the industry. Rasgon, who holds a Ph.D. from MIT and has an engineering background, provided staggering data: the semiconductor industry's total revenue surpassed $800 billion last year, and is now sprinting towards $1.3 trillion this year. All subsectors, from accelerators to memory, semiconductor equipment, network optics, power chips, and even CPUs, are facing overwhelming demand. "The only consensus we hear now is that no one's computing power is sufficient. Take memory, for example, where HBM in AI chips can account for over 85% of the silicon area. Manufacturing 1GB of HBM requires silicon area approximately four times that of standard DRAM, meaning that even with wafer fabs ramping up production like crazy, the actual storage capacity increase remains very limited. This supply-demand mismatch has even benefited Intel—its previously written-off inventory is now being snapped up, with customers saying, 'We don't care, just sell it to us.'

Rasgon pointed out that the industry's core focus is shifting from model training to AI inference, which is key to achieving commercialization—training models themselves don't make money, using the models does. Anthropic data shows that annualized revenue skyrocketed from around $9 billion in December last year to $30 billion in April this year, almost vertical. In the chip competitive landscape, the competition between custom ASICs represented by Broadcom and Nvidia GPUs is not a zero-sum game. "The right pain point is whether the opportunity is still growing—if it's significant enough, both will thrive." Currently, Broadcom expects AI revenue to reach $100 billion next year, with ASICs accounting for a double-digit percentage of AI chip market revenue, likely to rise to 25%-30% in the future, but they will not completely replace GPUs. Regarding emerging inference chip startups like Groq, recently acquired by Nvidia, Rasgon quoted Huang Renxun's judgment: "Not all tokens are the same, tokens with low latency are more valuable, and GPUs are not the optimal choice for all tasks."

When asked about the industry's most overlooked risk, Rasgon shifted the focus from silicon back to the physical world—electricity. It is estimated that if Nvidia's projected $3 to $4 trillion annual infrastructure investment materializes, the U.S. power grid would need to expand by about 5% annually, a growth rate that is seen as nearly an impossible task by power industry analysts. This implies that the next bottleneck will occur in the energy generation, cooling, and nuclear power sectors, but "never underestimate human creativity, engineers can always find a way out when it's profitable." Concerning Intel, new CEO Pat Gelsinger's strategy of setting low expectations has paid off, with the new 18A chip process yield better than expected, and government and Nvidia's investments have greatly alleviated previous market concerns about the balance sheet. Rasgon concluded by stating that as long as AI demand does not collapse, the full industry supercycle will continue, and the capital markets need to closely follow those capacity bottlenecks at every stage.