New report claims CPUs are next in line for a chip shortage but there's little evidence of that right now
Are CPUs about to become the next chip class struck down by an AI-instigated shortage, with prices spiralling and we poor gamers left fighting over scraps? That's the claim of a new report that has identified an imminent supply crunch in the CPU market.
Business outlet Quartz claims to have identified several trends that point toward an incoming CPU shortage. It notes that both Intel and AMD have increased the lead times for server CPU orders and claims that prices are beginning to increase, too.
At the same time, it points to Intel CFO David Zinsner's comments regarding the company's surprise over burgeoning demand from cloud customers to the point where Intel can't keep up with demand, and CPUs now ship straight to customers as soon as they come out of the fabs.
AMD is having its own problems keeping up with demand. But where Intel's issues are said to be at least in part down to poor yields at the company's own in-house fabs, AMD's challenge is securing production capacity from manufacturing partner TSMC to meet ballooning demand.
As for the reason why demand is increasing so much, that is, of course, said to be AI. The specific narrative here is that a new class of agentic AI services makes for significantly more CPU load. "Agentic AI systems behave differently. They plan, execute multi-step tasks, call APIs, query databases, write and run code, coordinate dozens of sub-processes, and evaluate whether they succeeded before starting over. All of that work happens on CPUs," Quartz says.
That's a change from AI training and inference, which is very much GPU- rather than CPU-heavy. Quartz also points to a round of system upgrades triggered by the end of official support from Microsoft for Windows 10 as a further source of demand for CPUs.
Overall, it's a plausible enough narrative. But it's hard to see much evidence of a CPU shortage in the real world. Retail pricing for CPUs has probably ticked upwards in recent months, but only very slightly and absolutely nothing that compares with the huge price increases seen in the memory market, especially for RAM.
What's more, Intel has just launched a pair of new desktop PC processors, the so-called Arrow Lake Plus chips, and perhaps their most notable characteristic is attractive pricing.
The new Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus matches the existing Core Ultra 9 285K for core count and very nearly matches it on clock speed. But it has an MSRP of just $299, absolutely miles below the $550 or so the 285K sells for.
The same goes for the new Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus. It's listed at $199 and so about the same as the 245K has been selling for of late. But the 250K has an additional four E cores and runs faster, too. Long story short, Intel's latest desktop CPUs look conspicuously good value, which doesn't exactly scream CPU shortage, does it?
In the medium term, much of this will probably hinge on the specifics of chip manufacturing. Put another way, the extent to which server and AI CPUs are built on the same nodes as consumer CPUs and indeed AI and consumer GPUs will be critical.
It may be the case, going forward, that the AI stuff increasingly monopolises the cutting-edge production nodes. That could set back consumer bit in development terms. But it could also make life easier and keep consumer prices lower if production is limited to legacy nodes for which there is less competition.