SILICON VALLEY — Intel Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan said the memory shortage will grow more severe, adding that securing electricity and developing cooling technology will also become major issues in the semiconductor market.
Tan pointed to the memory shortage when asked at the AI Infrastructure Forum in Santa Clara, California, on the 15th what problems he would like aspiring founders of AI infrastructure companies to solve.
"When I said early last year that memory could become a big bottleneck, I don't think many people realized it," Tan said. "It actually happened, and the situation will get worse." He added: "Capacity is also very limited. Many projects are being delayed because they cannot secure enough memory, and memory prices have risen five to seven times. It is very difficult to secure memory when building mid- and low-priced phones or laptops."
As AI processors such as graphics processing units alone run up against limits in boosting computing power, high-bandwidth memory, known as AI memory, has grown in importance. Demand for HBM has surged, but supply from Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), SK hynix (000660.KS) and Micron has failed to keep pace, deepening the shortage. As memory production lines have been reorganized around HBM, shortages have spread even to general-purpose memory.
Power and cooling technology are problems as well. "Everyone knows about the power problem. Power is very important, just as nuclear engineers and scientists once sought to obtain it," Tan said. "How architecture is driven and connectivity have also become important in order to achieve low power consumption in some applications." He continued: "Another area is cooling. Besides air cooling, there is liquid cooling and microfluidic cooling, and we are investing in several of these."
Tan advised paying attention to how the semiconductor market is shifting toward a systems structure. He was referring to the trend in which Nvidia and AMD combine GPUs, central processing units, networking and software into a single rack of equipment for sale. "Jensen and Lisa Su are doing that," he said, referring to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and the AMD chief executive. "Please listen closely to what we will announce in the substrate segment." He added: "It is important to look at the system rack, address the load, tailor it to customer needs and work together with them."
Tan said Intel would maintain its partnership with Nvidia, a major Intel shareholder and a competitor in the AI chip market. Asked where Intel would cooperate and where it would compete on its own, he said: "You cannot do everything, so it is important to choose and focus on the areas you are really good at, and to form partnerships and work together with other companies that have areas where they are far better."
