Nomura: It is still too early to judge that chip stocks have peaked, as demand for AI servers and supply chain bottlenecks continue to force cloud providers to invest further.

Mars Finance News, July 2 – Nomura recently stated in a deep-dive report on semiconductors that cloud vendors will still find it difficult to stop expanding by 2027. The iteration of AI models, growing demand for inference, expansion of data center construction plans, and tight supply in storage and advanced packaging will all compel cloud vendors to continue locking in chip, packaging, substrate, storage, and server resources.

Nomura's logic is that AI capital expenditure is not a short-term choice for any single company, but rather a competitive pressure among major cloud platforms. As long as companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta continue to compete for AI models, enterprise customers, and inference traffic, they will find it hard to voluntarily slow down infrastructure construction. Even if costs rise, stopping may mean losing their position in the platform competition.

The report specifically noted that while TSMC is expanding its CoWoS advanced packaging capacity, smaller substrate suppliers may become a new bottleneck. In other words, the bottleneck is not only in GPUs but also in advanced packaging, ABF/substrates, HBM, server assembly, and power infrastructure.

Nomura therefore favors supply chain companies such as TSMC, ASE, Aspeed, MediaTek, GlobalWafers, KYEC, Elite Material, and Zhen Ding. Its assessment contrasts with concerns about "AI overheating": the real problem is not that demand disappears, but that the supply chain is still insufficient; as long as bottlenecks exist, cloud vendors will continue to pay for scarce capacity.