AI Chip Component Costs: Memory at 63%
TL;DR · AI Summary
Memory now accounts for 63% of total AI chip component costs, making it the largest single cost driver.
Key Takeaways
- Memory cost reaches 63% of total AI chip components, exceeding other parts.
- High memory usage limits overall compute efficiency.
- Optimizing memory architecture can improve chip performance and reduce cost.
Outline
Jump quickly between sections.
Analysis of component cost distribution in AI chips.
Memory becomes the largest individual cost component in AI chips.
Memory capacity and bandwidth constrain training and inference performance.
Improving storage architecture can lower overall chip costs.
Growing model sizes increase demand for memory, posing new challenges.
Mindmap
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查看大纲文本（无障碍 / 无 JS 友好）
- AI芯片内存成本
- 成本占比
- 63%内存成本
- 远超其他组件
- 性能影响
- 算力效率受限
- 模型训练延迟
- 优化策略
- 架构升级
- 存储效率提升
Highlights
Key sentences worth saving and sharing.
Memory now accounts for 63% of total AI chip component costs, making it the largest single cost driver.
The increasing reliance on memory is a key factor limiting overall compute efficiency in modern AI systems.
Optimizing memory architecture could significantly reduce chip manufacturing costs while improving performance.
AI Chip Component Costs: Memory at 63% | Epoch AI | Epoch AI
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- Data Insights
- Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
Data Insight
May 21, 2026
Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
Cite
High-bandwidth memory (HBM) has grown from 52% to 63% of total AI chip component spending between Q1 2024 and Q4 2025. These estimates are an average across all AI chips designed by Nvidia, AMD, Google, and Amazon, weighted by production volume. As a share of spend, logic dies stayed roughly flat near 13%, while advanced packaging fell from 19% to 15% and auxiliary components fell from 15% to 9%. In absolute terms, HBM spend across these four designers grew from roughly $12 billion in 2024 to $32 billion in 2025, a faster year-over-year increase than any other component.
Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
|CC-BY epoch.ai Download graph
HBM will likely account for an even larger share in 2026 as memory supply remainstight and prices rise. Hyperscalers are already anticipating this in capex guidance: Microsoft’s $190 billion FY2026 capex outlook includes about $25 billion from higher component prices, while Meta raised its 2026 capex range by $10 billion, citing higher component prices.
Epoch's work is free to use, distribute, and reproduce provided the source and authors are credited under the Creative Commons BY license.
Learn more about this graph
For each AI chip designed by Nvidia, AMD, Google, and Amazon, we estimate the per-chip cost of four component categories: memory (HBM), logic dies, advanced packaging (CoWoS), and auxiliary components. We then multiply those per-chip costs by estimated quarterly production volumes to get total component spending in each category, and compute each category’s share of total component spending per quarter from Q1 2024 to Q4 2025.
We find that memory’s share rose from 52% to 63% over this period, while packaging fell from 19% to 15% and auxiliary components from 15% to 9%. Logic die share stayed roughly constant near 13–14%. Total component spend on AI chips grew from approximately $22 billion in 2024 to $52 billion in 2025, with HBM spending alone accounting for roughly $20 billion of that increase.
Data
Component cost estimates are drawn from our AI Chip Components explorer, which builds chip-level bills of materials from financial disclosures, supplier filings, and analyst reports. Four component categories are tracked:
- Memory: HBM stacks (HBM3, HBM3e).
- Logic: advanced-node logic dies (3 - 5nm).
- Packaging: TSMC CoWoS advanced packaging.
- Auxiliary: substrate, power delivery, and other non-logic, non-memory inputs.
See the explorer’s methodology documentation to learn more.
Analysis
Each unit of a component has some cost uncertainty, including the price of an HBM stack, a logic die, or a CoWoS package. We model each chip’s per-component cost with a 90% confidence interval and the share is a ratio of this component’s cost over the total, so both numerator and denominator are uncertain. We show two bounds on the share:
- Range from this component’s cost: the share when this component’s cost lands at its 5th or 95th percentile and the other three components are held at their medians.
- Range when all components vary at extremes: the share when this component sits at one extreme of its CI and every other component lands simultaneously at the opposite extreme of theirs.
Q1 2024:
| Component | Share | Range from this component’s cost | Range when all components vary at extremes | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Memory | 52% | 48 - 56% | 42 - 62% | | Logic | 14% | 12 - 17% | 10 - 20% | | Packaging | 19% | 14 - 24% | 12 - 27% | | Auxiliary | 15% | 13 - 18% | 11 - 21% |
Q4 2025:
| Component | Share | Range from this component’s cost | Range when all components vary at extremes | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Memory | 63% | 60 - 67% | 54 - 73% | | Logic | 13% | 10 - 16% | 9 - 19% | | Packaging | 15% | 11 - 19% | 9 - 22% | | Auxiliary | 10% | 8 - 10% | 7 - 12% |
Assumptions and limitations
Component costs can vary by contract, supplier, and timing, so our per-chip estimates carry some uncertainty. Our estimates of the number of chips produced each quarter and the chip-type mix also carry uncertainty, both of which propagate into the shares we report.
Download this data
[](https://epoch.ai/data/charts/ai-chip-component-cost-shares/ai-chip-component-cost-shares-by-quarter.csv)AI chip component cost shares by quarter
CSV, Updated May 21, 2026
Explore this data
[](https://epoch.ai/data/ai-chip-components)AI Chip Components
AI chip supply chain consumption data.
Related topics
ChipsFinancesLeading companies
Cite
Epoch AI’s work is free to use, distribute, and reproduce provided the source and authors are credited under theCreative Commons Attribution license.
Citation
Venkat Somala (2026), "Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs". Published online at epoch.ai. Retrieved from 'https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-chip-component-cost-shares' [online resource]. Accessed 24 May 2026.
BibTeX Citation
@misc{epoch2026aichipcomponentcostshares, title={{Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs}}, author={Venkat Somala}, year={2026}, url={https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-chip-component-cost-shares}, note={Accessed: 2026-05-24}}
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Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
High-bandwidth memory (HBM) accounts for 63% of AI chip component costs, up from 52% in Q1 2024. Epoch AI's breakdown of component cost shifts across major chip designers.