Fellow friends who follow the AI and decentralized computing power (DePIN) space: today, the upstream chip industry has sent an extremely shocking signal!
A major warning from SK hynix’s chairman Choi Tae-won, the head of the world’s leading storage giant and NVIDIA’s most core “arsenal” — in a recent exclusive interview: the demand from the AI ecosystem for memory has already completely exceeded supply limits, and next year will bring the worst “storage shortage” in history!
If you hold tokens related to Crypto + AI, decentralized computing power, or storage, you must understand the industrial logic behind this article:
🔥 1. Snatching chips is like going to war! Customer demand directly “doubles”
Demand doubles, expansion takes 4–5 years: Cui Taiyuan said that almost all big tech companies are asking for nearly twice the supply they originally requested. But expanding semiconductor capacity takes 4 to 5 years—there’s simply no way to make up this huge gap in the short term.
Without storage, GPUs are just scrap metal: the battle for computing power has evolved into “like a war.” Many tech giants have already flown to South Korea to line up and sign long-term agreements for HBM (high-bandwidth memory). Because once storage is missing, customers can’t even build the basic AI computing equipment and chips!
🤖 2. “Today’s AI is only 4 years old”—in the next five years, compute demand will surge 77x
Cui Taiyuan used an extremely vivid metaphor: today’s AI is only equivalent to a 4-year-old child.
As large language models evolve into autonomous intelligent agents (AI Agents), the number of agent users is expected to soar by 77x within the next five years! This means that today’s compute consumption is still just the tip of the iceberg, and the whole industry’s thirst for foundational hardware infrastructure has only just begun.
⛓️ 3. Wall Street calls it being “choked”—what does that mean for Web3?
A well-known financial TV host said plainly that the tech industry has long been “choked by SK hynix.” NVIDIA may dominate GPU compute, but the underlying AI system it relies on must be supported by SK hynix’s HBM.
Over the past year, SK hynix’s stock price has surged nearly 5x. This kind of deep interlock among global hardware giants, along with severe capacity shortages, is sending a clear signal to the whole industry: compute power and storage will become the hardest-core hard currency in the years ahead!
💡 What it means for crypto investors: when traditional tech giants are forced to fight a “compute power defense battle” due to hardware supply cuts, decentralized computing networks (DePIN) and distributed storage in the Web3 space will inevitably open up more narrative space and deserve a major value reappraisal.
The main line of the next bull market is always inseparable from a real breakthrough in technological productive capacity. Keep your eyes on the AI compute track—don’t sell your chips too early before the true supercycle arrives.
