A public research surface · updated continuously
The AI buildout will be won by whoever owns the chokepoints.
HBM stacks, CoWoS packaging, EUV optics, gigawatts of power, optical interconnect, liquid cooling. Compute Bottlenecks maps the physical supply chain behind every GPU cluster — and the listed companies that own each choke. Own the strait, not the tanker.
60 names tracked · 10 chokepoints · free, no login
The chokepoints
I
HBM & memory bandwidth
Every accelerator is bandwidth-starved; high-bandwidth memory comes from three companies and is sold out years ahead.
MU · 000660.KS · SSNLF · CAMT · ONTO · FORM · BESIY
II
Advanced packaging & CoWoS
The GPU shortage has repeatedly been a packaging shortage: 2.5D/3D interposer and hybrid-bonding capacity, not wafer starts, sets accelerator output.
TSM · AMKR · ASX · BESIY · ONTO · CAMT
III
Lithography & EUV optics
Leading-edge logic and DRAM both route through one EUV toolmaker — and the single-source optics and laser chain inside it.
ASML · ZEISSSMT · TRUMPF · KLAC · LRCX · AMAT
IV
Leading-edge foundry
Every frontier accelerator is fabbed by one company, mostly in one geography; the alternatives are years behind.
TSM · ASML · INTC · ZEISSSMT · SSNLF · SHECY
V
Power, grid & generation
Datacenter interconnect queues and transformer lead times are measured in years; gigawatts are the new wafer starts.
CEG · VST · TLN · GEV · ETN · PWR · HUBB · CLF
VI
Liquid cooling & thermal
Rack densities past 100 kW make direct-liquid cooling mandatory — and the cold-plate, CDU and rear-door supply chain is thin.
VRT · MOD · NVT · ECL · SBGSY · COOLIT · BOYD
VII
Optical interconnect & networking
Scaling clusters beyond a rack is an optics problem: 800G/1.6T transceivers, co-packaged optics, and the lasers and DSPs inside them.
COHR · LITE · FN · MRVL · CRDO · AAOI · ANET
VIII
Substrates, resist & wafer materials
ABF substrates, advanced photoresists, and 300mm silicon are quiet few-supplier markets sitting under every chip.
IBIDF · AJNMY · SHECY · SUOPY · ENTG · MKKGY · FUJIY · SHWDF · TOKCF
IX
Accelerators & the capex layer
The visible layer: accelerator designers and the hyperscaler capex programs that every other choke feeds.
NVDA · AVGO · AMD · GOOGL · AMZN · META · MSFT
X
Private giants & exposure vehicles
OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI — the AI cap tables without tickers, and the listed and quasi-listed paths into them.
MSFT · AMZN · GOOGL · CRWV · SFTBY · OPENAI · ANTHROPIC · VCX
Latest brief · 2026-07-27
The grid-versus-silicon split from Thursday widened — Cleveland-Cliffs extended its transformer re-rate while Intel's foundry doubt and a Shin-Etsu guidance pull dragged the whole semiconductor and optical tier down.
Cleveland-Cliffs led again, up 8.9% to $11.93, following Thursday's 16% earnings pop with more of the same. CLF anchors the power-grid chokepoint as the sole US producer of grain-oriented electrical steel and a converter of distribution-transformer capacity — the physical bottleneck behind multi-year transformer lead times that gate how fast a datacenter can energize. Friday's move was continuation rather than fresh news: momentum on a genuine cyclical steel re-rate, and the one part of the AI buildout the market rewarded while the silicon it feeds sold off.
Shin-Etsu's ADR was the laggard, down 12.8% to $18.49, after the world's largest silicon-wafer and PVC maker reported a weak quarter and again declined to give full-year guidance, citing crude and naphtha uncertainty that makes its PVC business impossible to forecast. Shin-Etsu sits in the substrates-and-wafer-materials chokepoint under every leading-edge die; semiconductor materials remain strong, but PVC weakness and a withheld outlook were enough, and the Tokyo reaction compressed into the US ADR as a double-digit gap.
The rest of the compute tier fell with Intel. Intel dropped 7.9% to $92.32 — its Q2 doubled EPS and beat on revenue, but the market fixed on the unnamed 18A foundry customer and $20B-plus capex, hitting the leading-edge-foundry chokepoint directly. Optical interconnect was routed: CoreWeave fell 11.4% to $71.88, Applied Optoelectronics 10.6% to $100.15, Credo 9.9% to $213.15, Coherent 9.8%, Lumentum 8.5% to $762.99. Memory and packaging followed — Micron off 7.0% to $920.95 on the HBM line, Marvell down 7.2% to $194.23. The offsets were thin: SK hynix rose 3.2% in Seoul to ₩1,816,000 into its July 29 print, Ecolab added 2.1% and Ajinomoto 1.3% on ABF substrate demand.
The calendar is the densest of the quarter. Amkor reports today (July 27); Alphabet and Microsoft (fiscal Q4, after the close) on July 28; SK hynix's definitive HBM read on July 29; and KLA, Quanta and Entegris on July 30, before AMD (Aug 4), Vertiv and Eaton (Aug 5). With Intel's foundry question unanswered and the optical tier de-rating hard, these prints decide whether Friday was a rotation into the grid chokepoint or the start of a broader AI-capex digestion.