According to an analysis from SemiAnalysis, High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is becoming the biggest bottleneck in the global AI hardware race, directly impacting Huawei's efforts to ramp up production of its Ascend chip line despite its foundry supply chain remaining operational.
Background
In its in-depth reports, SemiAnalysis points out that computing power is the lifeblood of the AI era. However, scaling memory to keep pace with GPUs and accelerators is hitting a "memory wall." For Huawei, although the fabrication of its base chips continues with TSMC's support, the shortage of high-quality HBM supply has significantly slowed down the large-scale commercialization of the Ascend chip line in the Chinese market.
Developments
To overcome this barrier, the semiconductor industry is reshaping the entire development roadmap for high-performance memory. The upcoming HBM4 generation is expected to bring revolutionary changes through the adoption of custom base dies. According to SemiAnalysis, this shift requires unprecedented close collaboration among chip designers, memory vendors, and semiconductor foundries to optimize the separation of prefill and decode phases in large language models.
Why It Matters
For the Vietnamese tech community, this memory bandwidth battle demonstrates that having a powerful chip design is not enough without an advanced packaging ecosystem and an independent memory supply chain. The HBM bottleneck not only restrains giants but also directly drives up the operational costs of AI models, forcing local businesses to proactively optimize software and KVCache offload techniques to adapt to the physical limitations of hardware.