The Next Bottleneck in AI Buildout appears to be Capacitors

[worldstarcountry]

Specifically, something called the Multi-Layered Ceramic Capacitor (MLCC). Current orders are double production capacity for the primary producers, and the bulk of Earth's capacitor production is dominated by Korea and Japan (thankfully allies. Now if anyone is into reading financial news, which anyone who complains about money and wages should be otherwise they're not on a solutions oriented frame of mind, we will have noticed the alarm bells were going off a couple months back while chips and memory were still being hyped up. However, I have recently noticed in the last couple of weeks articles are now being released primarily for premium subscribers regarding the issue. But the articles coming out are for paid subscribers. 

Now whenever I see data behind a paywall, two things  come to mind:

1. There will be decent money to be made in these trades and they know it so they want to double dip buy charging their followers as well. This is fair enough, after all their teams spend many hours going over industry reports and board meetings on production timelines, manufacturing trends, regulatory frameworks etc.. etc..
   
2. The data is available somewhere else with enough searching and then the studies can be further refined from what is learned.
   

So I did find an article from two months back which still covers the important information that will be found behind the paywalls. I am not really nudging anyone into any investments or telling you get ready to be instantly rich. What I am saying is there is a physical reality leading to a bottleneck of a supply product which is critical to the continued industry build-out that is  data centers and AI. This article goes over it, identifies the primary suppliers and manufacturers of the in-demand item which is running into a production bottleneck not due to lack of resources but due to extreme demand. 

Prices are jumping with limited suppliers but the revenue stream and orders continue to rise as a result. Which means they remain profitable, and will expect much good business.

So lets get the data I guess:

Key Takeaways

• The Invisible Bottleneck: A single NVIDIA GB300 AI server requires roughly 30,000 Multi-Layer Ceramic Capacitors (MLCCs), 30 times more than a smartphone. A full NVL72 rack uses about 441,000.
  
• A Two-Company Chokepoint: Murata Manufacturing and Samsung Electro-Mechanics together control 84% of AI server-grade MLCC production. Murata alone holds 45%.
  
• Demand Has Outrun Supply: Murata’s AI server MLCC order inquiries are running at roughly twice its production capacity. Prices jumped 15-35% on April 1, 2026, the first major hike in three years.
  
• No Quick Fix: Murata completed a new ¥47 billion production building in April 2026, but it primarily targets automotive and industrial segments. AI server-grade capacity expansion remains a multi-year ramp. Chinese alternatives remain locked out of the high-end market.
  

 All true. But buried beneath the GPU headlines sits a bottleneck that almost nobody outside the electronics supply chain is watching, one that could delay server deployments just as effectively as a chip shortage, and for which there is even less slack in the system.
 
It is a ceramic chip smaller than a grain of rice: the Multi-Layer Ceramic Capacitor (MLCC).
An MLCC does not compute anything. It stores and releases tiny bursts of electrical charge, smoothing out the voltage ripples that would otherwise fry the delicate silicon running your AI model. Every processor on a server board is surrounded by hundreds or thousands of them, arrayed around the chip like a defensive perimeter. Without them, the GPU draws power, the voltage sags by a few millivolts, and the computation fails.
 
The problem is scale. A smartphone contains over 1,000 MLCCs. A traditional server uses a few thousand. An NVIDIA GB300 AI server, the kind hyperscalers are fighting to deploy, needs approximately 30,000. That is 30 times a smartphone and roughly eight times a conventional server.
 
Scale that up to a full rack and the numbers get absurd. An NVL36 rack requires around 234,000 MLCCs. The flagship NVL72 liquid-cooled rack, the configuration Microsoft, Google, and Meta are racing to deploy, consumes approximately 441,000.
And nearly all of them come from two companies.

 
The global MLCC market is dominated by Japanese and Korean manufacturers. Murata Manufacturing, headquartered in Kyoto, holds over 40% of global MLCC production. Samsung Electro-Mechanics (SEMCO) holds roughly 18%, followed by TDK at 12% and Taiyo Yuden and Yageo at approximately 10% each.
But global market share understates the concentration in the AI segment. When you narrow the lens to the high-capacitance, low-ESL (Equivalent Series Inductance) MLCCs that AI server power delivery demands, the market shrinks to a duopoly: Murata at 45% and Samsung at 39%.
 Murata projects that AI server MLCC demand will grow at a 30% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2030, with total demand reaching 3.3 times its 2025 levels.
If that projection holds, the current shortage is not a spike but the beginning of a structural reallocation of the world’s passive component manufacturing toward AI, much like the DRAM reallocation toward HBM that is already cannibalizing the smartphone memory supply.
 
The near-term math is unforgiving. Even with the Izumo building online, Murata’s announced expansions add capacity in the low double digits percentagewise while AI server MLCC demand grows at a projected 30% annually. The expansions do not close the current gap. Meaningful surplus capacity, if it arrives at all, is a 2028-2030 story.
 
For hyperscalers, this means the AI infrastructure build-out will proceed at the speed of the slowest component. Increasingly, that component is not the GPU or the memory. It is the ceramic chip that no one put on the critical path.
For investors, the passive component supply chain may be the most underappreciated “picks and shovels” play in the AI trade. Murata’s stock (TYO: 6981) trades at valuations more typical of a mature industrial company than a monopoly gatekeeper of the hottest technology buildout in history.
And for the AI industry as a whole, the lesson is the same one the auto industry learned in 2021, when a fifty-cent chip held up a fifty-thousand-dollar truck: the supply chain is only as strong as its most ignored link.
The $0.02 capacitor has become the most overlooked critical part in a trillion-dollar industry. And two companies in Kyoto and Suwon are deciding how fast the AI boom actually gets built.

I only had a basic and limited understanding of capacitors to begin with let alone Multi Layered Ceramic Capacitors. Now I am learning two companies  essentially  have a duopoly on these specific types in high demand for the AI buildout stuff. Im just putting two and two together. Two companies control something increasing in demand and price, with no immediate serious competitor available to absorb extra demand. That usually does something to prices and values in the near-term . So I just thought from a financial and even engineering perspective, this may be of interest to some of you.

I am not encouraging anyone to invest in anything or offering advice, I just wanted to share some new information I learned about.