Semiconductor analysts are bullish on the AI market, saying it will run “at least another three years”: advanced packaging is the industry bottleneck

Semiconductor analyst Bubble Boi, who has recently gained some buzz on the social platform X, appeared on a TBPN livestream interview on Wednesday. He said that the AI investment cycle is still in its early stages—there is still at least three years of upside ahead—and that he has no intention of taking profits. He also pointed out that “advanced packaging” is the industry’s real bottleneck and predicted that memory prices will continue to rise.

The AI capex frenzy isn’t over: We’re only just getting started

Bubble Boi believes the current AI investment cycle is still in a “very early” phase. He noted that major global hyperscalers have planned total capital expenditures of as much as 680 billion US dollars this year, and that the construction of data centers worldwide is, essentially, still not completed.

He used an energy-industry analogy, describing AI’s compute resources—tokenized—as “new oil or power,” emphasizing that AI compute power has long moved from being optional to becoming infrastructure, and that the market’s pricing for this shift is still not sufficient.

“Advanced packaging” is the real bottleneck for the semiconductor industry

On the technical trend front, Bubble Boi believes the industry’s focus is shifting from the process-node race to “advanced packaging (Advanced Packaging),” and he bluntly called it the “new Moore’s Law.” His argument is:

Simply shrinking chip process nodes is no longer enough to meet AI compute demand. What technology giants truly need is the integration of more high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and larger-size chips within the same package.

Taking Intel as an example, he explained that his investment logic is no longer centered on whether the 18A or 14A process nodes can ramp into production smoothly; instead, it has shifted to its planning and competitiveness in advanced packaging capabilities. He also stressed that the technical barriers of advanced packaging are a key variable that many financial people who only look at numbers are prone to overlook.

(CoWoS average wafer pricing breaks $10,000—advanced packaging becomes TSMC’s new profit engine)

Memory’s uptrend is clear: Flash suppliers will keep testing the market ceiling

Regarding the memory market outlook, Bubble Boi is strongly bullish on the NAND Flash market. He predicts that flash memory makers represented by SanDisk will keep raising selling prices until the next customers show clear resistance. At the same time, he closely monitors whether CPU products can successfully achieve a 25% to 30% increase. These forecasts reflect his view that the overall semiconductor supply-and-demand structure is still relatively tight.

He also revealed that he may join a mature flash memory supply-chain company in the future, because he believes the long-term expansion potential of Flash technology is still being seriously underestimated by the market.

(What has changed with NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin? Analyzing the memory “Warring States” era: SK hynix, Samsung, Micron, SanDisk)

Personally, I don’t plan to take profits: “This AI rally still has at least three years left”

On his personal investment strategy, Bubble Boi said he has absolutely no intention of taking profits or increasing his cash position. Instead, he is considering borrowing more funds to expand his investment exposure—because he has high confidence in the market over the next three years.

Also, when asked frequently by outsiders why an analyst still needs a full-time job, he replied that, as a full-time engineer, this job is one of the important sources for his investment judgment:

Being in an environment where I actually solve engineering problems allows me to understand technical details—such as advanced packaging and chip yield—from a competitiveness perspective, rather than starting purely from financial models. This is the advantage I have over other analysts with purely financial backgrounds.

This article — Semiconductor analyst bullish on the AI rally: “At least another three years”: Advanced packaging is the industry bottleneck — first appeared on Chain News ABMedia.