DEV-TOOLSMay 24, 20261 min read12 views

Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

According to research by Epoch, memory (HBM) has become the dominant cost driver for AI chips, projected to reach 63% of total component costs by late 2025 as total component spend surges to $52 billion.

Epoch's work is free to use, distribute, and reproduce provided the source and authors are credited under the Creative Commons BY license.

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For each AI chip designed by Nvidia, AMD, Google, and Amazon, we estimate the per-chip cost of four component categories: memory (HBM), logic dies, advanced packaging (CoWoS), and auxiliary components. We then multiply those per-chip costs by estimated quarterly production volumes to get total component spending in each category, and compute each category’s share of total component spending per quarter from Q1 2024 to Q4 2025.

We find that memory’s share rose from 52% to 63% over this period, while packaging fell from 19% to 15% and auxiliary components from 15% to 9%. Logic die share stayed roughly constant near 13–14%. Total component spend on AI chips grew from approximately $22 billion in 2024 to $52 billion in 2025, with HBM spending alone accounting for roughly $20 billion of that increase.

Source: Hacker News

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