Multiple MLCC manufacturers claim they are "brewing price increases", and the industry expects prices to rise until the end of 2027.

At the start of the second half of the year, MLCCs are once again making headlines for price increases.

On July 1, media reports said that the market has heard that passive components company Yageo has notified customers that, effective today, it will raise quotations for its entire range of capacitor products, covering multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs), aluminum electrolytic capacitors, tantalum capacitors, polymer aluminum capacitors, film capacitors, and supercapacitors. This is the largest round of price increases by Yageo in recent years.

Earlier, overseas MLCC manufacturers such as Murata, Samsung Electro-Mechanics, and Taiyo Yuden issued price-adjustment notices. For high-capacity MLCCs used in AI servers, the typical price-increase range is generally 15% to 35%, and for some scarce models, spot-market quotations have doubled.

On the same day, a reporter from 21st Century Economic Herald learned at the Munich Shanghai Electronics Fair in Munich that several MLCC manufacturers are already brewing price hikes for the second half of the year.

A staff member at the booth of a leading manufacturer told reporters that the company’s internal expectation is that MLCC prices will continue rising until the end of 2027. Another senior executive at a leading manufacturer said that the uptrend in prices for high-capacity and ultra-high-capacity MLCCs could even extend to 2028 through 2029. The executive said, “Although the number of MLCCs used in AI servers is not large, because yields are lower, the consumption of production capacity is 5 times, 10 times, or more that of medium-capacity. This further expands the production-capacity gap in the consumer electronics field, and it is the core reason behind this round of price increases.”

The staff member at the Sunway Communication booth also told reporters that, driven by demand from AI servers, the MLCCs seeing price increases recently are mainly high-capacity types. “The production capacity required to make one high-capacity MLCC can produce several low-capacity MLCCs. For example, if AI servers consume production capacity equivalent to 100 million MLCCs, in practice it crowds out the production capacity for several billions of low-capacity products that originally belonged to the consumer electronics field.”

The staff member further pointed out that the difference between AI-server-grade MLCCs and consumer-grade and automotive-grade MLCCs lies in reliability requirements and operating conditions. Consumer-grade MLCCs only need a 5-year lifetime, because they are used in comparatively milder environments and are replaced more frequently by users, resulting in lower reliability requirements. Automotive-grade MLCCs, due to safety concerns, must meet stringent standards of 10 years without failure. AI-server-grade MLCCs, however, have extremely high requirements—not only do they need to run continuously 24 hours a day, but they also face harsh operating conditions such as high temperatures, high voltages, and high currents. This is in stark contrast to consumer electronics, which use batteries and operate in comfortable indoor temperature environments.

A research report from TF Securities said that AI servers are driving an increase in the total MLCC capacitance demand, making high capacitance density a core direction. Differences in the supply-and-demand structure support price increases for high-end MLCCs. By mid-2026, signals released by other MLCC manufacturers further confirm the current imbalance in the supply structure of high-end AI-server MLCCs. With limited production-expansion elasticity for high-end MLCCs, pressure on high-end supply could intensify further in the second half of 2026.

Source: 21st Century Economic Herald

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