AI smart chips are in short supply, and some chip prices "avalanche"

    For large chip manufacturers, the fate has changed rapidly. NVIDIA and other companies said that the core business would decline by more than 40% every year. Micron Technology warned that the demand in many fields was rapidly disappearing.

    When Biden signed a $52 billion chip bill to subsidize domestic production, Micron Technology, the largest storage chip manufacturer in the United States, told investors that demand was fading.

    Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon said: "This is a bit of black humor. Politicians will find that when the industry turns, the chip shortage problem will be solved automatically soon."

    PC manufacturers are big buyers of chips, and they can see the first signs of the chip industry turning. According to the data of Mercury Research, the shipment of desktop processors in the second quarter fell to the lowest level in nearly three decades. Since 1984, the total processor shipments have experienced the largest year-on-year decline.

    This is a legacy of the epidemic blockade. During the epidemic, the trend of working at home stimulated the demand for personal computers and other equipment. As a result, chip manufacturers are busy fulfilling a large number of orders, while supply chain obstacles make customers feel desperate. Electronic equipment manufacturers are willing to pay a high price to buy chips.

    Now, consumers are reducing large expenditures, and chip buyers are following suit, creating what the industry calls "inventory correction". The last similar downturn occurred in 2019 and did not last long.

    However, due to the weak global economy, it is expected that this time the situation will be particularly serious. If inventory adjustment occurs while the economy is in recession, the chip industry will not rebound as quickly as last time.

    Since this year, although the problem of chip shortage has improved from last year, the supply of chips in some fields is still tight. In view of the new changes in the chip market, some enterprises have continuously expanded their capacity, and some enterprises have transformed to new tracks. With the increasing popularity of the new energy vehicle market in recent years, it has become the choice of many enterprises to transform the research and development of chips urgently needed for the production of new energy vehicles. In a chip enterprise in Xuzhou High-tech Zone, Jiangsu Province, several production lines are running at high speed to produce a high-power organic passivation chip for vehicles, which is mainly used in the power controller of new energy vehicles.

    In a chip packaging and testing production factory in Shenzhen, the production director said that their production capacity has been increasing in recent years. Orders from auto manufacturers have poured in, and the capacity utilization rate of this factory has been close to 100%. In order to ensure delivery, the enterprise imported a lot of manufacturing equipment to expand the production line and improve the production capacity. According to the data, due to the shortage of chips, it is expected that by the end of this year, the cumulative production reduction of global auto companies will climb to 3.8294 million vehicles.

    Industry insiders said that the mismatch between supply and demand made chip supply tight in the fields of automobile, industrial automation and AI big data. In recent years, Chinese enterprises have increased their investment in the chip industry year by year. The data shows that up to now, there are more than 416000 chip-related enterprises in China; Among them, 68000 new registered enterprises were added from January to July 2022, with an average monthly growth rate of 41.6%; From the time of establishment, 26.8% of chip-related enterprises were established within one year.