AI supply‑chain strains show up
Suppliers crucial to AI hardware are shifting capacity and pricing: SanDisk is opening a NAND stacking ‘HBF’ market with pilot lines and supply‑chain buildout, while Ajinomoto — which controls about 95% of high‑end ABF film — is facing pressure from activists to push price increases above 30% amid strong Nvidia demand. Those moves signal tighter upstream supply for AI servers and potential input‑cost pressure across the AI stack. (x.com) (x.com)
A pair of moves by little-known suppliers is tightening the hardware pipeline behind artificial intelligence servers. SanDisk is accelerating a new memory format, while Ajinomoto is under pressure to raise prices on a packaging material used in advanced chips. (trendforce.com) (businesswire.com) SanDisk has started lining up materials, components and equipment partners for a pilot line for High Bandwidth Flash, or HBF, a NAND-based memory that stacks flash chips to sit between High Bandwidth Memory and solid-state drives in artificial intelligence systems. TrendForce, citing ETNews and other Korean outlets, said prototypes are targeted for the second half of 2026, with commercialization aimed at 2027 and Japan a leading candidate for the pilot site. (trendforce.com) SanDisk and SK hynix said on February 25 they had launched a workstream under the Open Compute Project to standardize HBF for artificial intelligence inference, the stage when trained models answer users’ prompts. SK hynix said HBF is meant to add a new memory layer between High Bandwidth Memory, or HBM, and solid-state drives to improve capacity and power efficiency. (news.skhynix.com) The bottleneck here is memory, not just chips. SandDisk said in 2025 that HBF is designed to address the “memory wall,” the gap between how fast graphics processors can compute and how much data current memory systems can feed them. (sandisk.com) At the same time, Ajinomoto is facing investor pressure on a material that sits much earlier in the chain. Palliser Capital said on March 31 that it wants Ajinomoto to raise prices for Ajinomoto Build-up Film, or ABF, by more than 30%, calling the product central to advanced semiconductor packaging and to artificial intelligence infrastructure. (businesswire.com) (morningstar.com) ABF is the insulating film that helps build the layered package substrate connecting a processor to the circuit board beneath it. Palliser’s March 2026 presentation said Ajinomoto has about 95% of the global ABF market and roughly 100% share in high-end artificial intelligence data-center applications, with no qualified substitute at the top end. (businesswire.com) Ajinomoto has already been expanding capacity. Nikkei, cited by TrendForce in April 2025, said the company planned to invest at least 25 billion yen by 2030 to lift ABF production capacity by 50%, after already spending 25 billion yen over the prior two years. (trendforce.com) Ajinomoto’s own 2025 integrated report put ABF at the center of its information and communications technology growth strategy, a sign the company was already presenting the material as a core profit engine rather than a side business. Its investor relations calendar shows the next results announcement is scheduled for May 7, 2026, when investors will be looking for any response on pricing, margins and capacity. (ajinomoto.co.jp 1) (ajinomoto.co.jp 2) Neither move changes demand for Nvidia-class accelerators overnight. But one supplier is trying to create a new memory tier for inference servers, and another is being pushed to charge more for a packaging material that those servers already need. (news.skhynix.com) (businesswire.com)
