The official confirmation has now been made that the AI chip crisis will continue at least until 2027. Looking at TSMC's recent quarterly report and data from the GPU leasing market, it becomes clear how serious this supply shortage is.

TSMC President Wei Zhejia sent a very clear message: factory construction takes 2-3 years, and there is no shortcut. Q1 revenue was around 35 billion dollars, but the real highlight is the increase in capital expenditures to 56 billion dollars. This figure exceeds the total spending of the past three years. Why such an aggressive move? Because they know that AI demand is "extremely strong," but resolving supply shortages will take years.

The situation in the GPU market is even more interesting. The leasing price of NVIDIA H100 increased by nearly 40% from the end of last year to the beginning of this year. Hourly leasing rose from $1.70 to $2.35. According to some calculations, monthly leasing costs jumped from 40-50 thousand yuan to 80-90 thousand yuan. Half of the market participants say that H series stock is unavailable. Some H100 contracts have even extended renewal periods up to 4 years.

This price pressure is spreading across every level of the supply chain. Tencent Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu Smart Cloud announced multiple price increases within these months. In some cases, entry and exit prices increased more than fourfold. As cloud providers directly start selling tokens, prices are skyrocketing.

The four major cloud companies plan to invest approximately $700 billion by 2026. Most of this money goes to NVIDIA chips, which are produced almost entirely by TSMC. On the supply side, 3-nanometer production will begin in the first half of 2027. The demand growth rate is much faster than the increase in production capacity.

Conclusion: Pricing rights will remain on the supply side at least until 2027. For TSMC, NVIDIA, and memory manufacturers, this represents an extremely high-confidence growth window. In the short term, these trends do not seem to reverse.