BlockBeats News, August 18th — Analyst Jukan from Citrini pointed out that the MLCC delivery lead time is experiencing significant differentiation due to different product specifications. The delivery time for general products remains stable at 14 to 18 weeks (approximately 3.5 to 4.5 months), while high-capacitance and high-voltage products are around 4 to 5 months. However, the high-end products used in AI servers have entered a state of "severe supply constraint." The lead time for MLCCs from Murata and Samsung Electro-Mechanics for server-level applications exceeds 20 weeks (over 5 months), with Samsung Electro-Mechanics' some high-capacitance products averaging around 40 weeks, and Murata's above 1μF high-capacitance products seeing lead times increase from 24 weeks in June to 30 weeks in July, with some channel offers even reaching 36 weeks, close to 10 months.

This extreme differentiation is expected to continue until the second half of 2026. The core driving force behind this differentiation is the strong demand from AI servers and data centers — the quantity of high-capacitance, miniaturized, and highly reliable MLCCs required by AI servers is 5 to 13 times that of traditional servers. New capacity expansion has been postponed from Q4 2026 to 2027. In the short term, the supply-demand imbalance is difficult to alleviate, leading major manufacturers to simultaneously raise prices and increase long-term supply agreements. Delivery lead times exceeding 5 months, even close to a year, not only indicate that manufacturers cannot ramp up supply quickly in the short term but also signify the beginning of substantial improvements in profitability driven by enhanced pricing power and a portfolio shift towards high-value products. The AI bottleneck is now shifting from GPUs and memory to the smallest components on the board.