The Memory Wall: HBM and AI’s Second Bottleneck
Power is the buildout’s most-discussed constraint; memory is its least-appreciated one. HBM is sold out, its makers are diverting capacity from ordinary DRAM, and the packaging that assembles it is itself a bottleneck.
What this report covers
- The HBM oligopoly: SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron
- How HBM is crowding out DRAM and driving a memory supercycle
- Rising memory content per GPU (Blackwell → Rubin)
- CoWoS advanced packaging as the bottleneck behind the bottleneck
The data behind it
The analyst research builds on our live frontier compute data, shown here in full. The interpretation, outlook, and models are the part you can’t auto-generate — that’s the premium report.
Largest frontier data centers by reported power (Epoch AI, CC BY 4.0) · live site data as of Aug 14, 2026
| Facility | Operator | MW |
|---|---|---|
| Colossus 2 | xAI | 946 |
| Anthropic-Amazon New Carlisle | Amazon | 910 |
| Microsoft Fairwater Atlanta | Microsoft | 636 |
| Meta Prometheus | Meta | 562 |
| OpenAI Stargate Abilene | Oracle | 421 |
| Microsoft Fairwater Wisconsin | Microsoft | 369 |
| Colossus 1 | xAI | 340 |
| Google New Albany | 339 | |
| Google Columbus | 303 | |
| Amazon Madison Mega Site | Amazon | 284 |
The Memory Wall: HBM and AI’s Second Bottleneck
Power is the buildout’s most-discussed constraint; memory is its least-appreciated one. HBM is sold out, its makers are diverting capacity from ordinary DRAM, and the packaging that assembles it is itself a bottleneck.
- The HBM oligopoly: SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron
- How HBM is crowding out DRAM and driving a memory supercycle
- Rising memory content per GPU (Blackwell → Rubin)
- CoWoS advanced packaging as the bottleneck behind the bottleneck
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About “The Memory Wall: HBM and AI’s Second Bottleneck”
Power is the buildout’s most-discussed constraint; memory is its least-appreciated one. HBM is sold out, its makers are diverting capacity from ordinary DRAM, and the packaging that assembles it is itself a bottleneck. It is part of our premium analyst research — interpretation, forward outlooks, and models that go beyond the free data reports, included with a paid plan. Explore the underlying data on the power, policy, markets, and map pages.