Is global AI chip production being choked by a single MSG manufacturer? With a market share surpassing 95%, even NVIDIA has to queue for capacity.

Glonghui April 15｜According to 36Kr, could a monosodium glutamate (MSG) company be holding the lifeline of global AI chips? When discussing bottlenecks in AI chips, people generally think of names like NVIDIA's GPU, Samsung and SK Hynix's HBM, or TSMC's CoWoS advanced packaging. These are indeed crucial stages of production. However, there is another, more hidden chokepoint deep within the entire supply chain. Surprisingly, this key node is not controlled by a semiconductor giant, but by a Japanese company commonly known for selling MSG—Ajinomoto. What most people don’t know is that in the semiconductor industry, it has another identity: the near-exclusive global supplier of ABF (Ajinomoto Build-up Film), the most critical insulating material for AI chip packaging. According to reports from industry organizations such as TrendForce, Ajinomoto’s global market share in ABF materials for GPU and CPU packaging substrates exceeds 95%. Ajinomoto's seasoning product, Masako chicken stock, is well-known, but very few realize that this seasoning company also controls over 95% of the world’s supply of ABF, a vital material for AI chip packaging. In its 2023 annual report, Ajinomoto defined ABF as the “de facto standard” for the semiconductor market. This means that nearly every high-performance chip in the world, from Intel’s CPUs to NVIDIA’s AI accelerators, relies on this thin insulating film supplied by this “MSG factory.”