BlockBeats News, July 28th, Analyst Jukan cited the latest industry research from TrendForce, stating that in June, the top three MLCC manufacturers in South Korea and Japan achieved a five-year record high monthly shipment volume. Murata delivered 140 billion pieces, Samsung Electro-Mechanics 98 billion pieces, and Taiyo Yuden 40 billion pieces. This growth was mainly driven by strong demand in AI applications, and the momentum has continued into July. The procurement momentum of cloud service providers' self-developed ASICs (such as Google TPU and AWS Trainium) remains strong, driving the demand for high-capacitance, low-voltage, small-size MLCCs. However, AI-grade capacity is diverting the supply from consumer applications: South Korean and Japanese manufacturers are rapidly shifting consumer-grade X5R capacity to higher-spec X6S/X7R products for AI applications, leading to pressure on the capacity of medium- to high-capacitance consumer-grade MLCCs (1µF to 22µF), with key product inventories generally decreasing to 30 days or less.

Jukan pointed out that the supply shortage has triggered a chain reaction, with a surge in urgent orders from distributors. The spillover effect of orders has benefited Taiwanese and mainland Chinese suppliers, and channel prices have risen sharply: distributors who stockpiled goods have raised prices by an average of 20% to 25%, and spot market prices have surged to 2 to 3 times the original levels. The market is showing a structural differentiation of "soft end demand but resilient channel prices": on one hand, the consumer electronics sector is experiencing continued weakness due to escalating U.S.-Iran geopolitical tensions, reignited inflation concerns, and Apple's recent price hikes for MacBook and iPad; on the other hand, the AI bottleneck is shifting from GPUs and memory to the smallest components on the board, with capacity reallocation and channel scarcity emerging as the primary drivers of the current price strength.