Chipmakers Say AI Demand Is Squeezing Supply of Basic Chips for Cars and Factories

In an interview with Reuters at the Electronica trade fair in Munich, Tilger said some competitors had shifted capacity away from the commodity semiconductors Nexperia supplies, creating bottlenecks in parts of the automotive supply chain. "The automotive industry is suffering at the moment quite heavily," he said.

The parts in short supply are not the advanced processors at the centre of the AI boom. They are diodes, transistors and other basic components that every car and production line needs in large volumes. If data centre spending keeps pulling capacity and investment away from these mature technologies, carmakers and industrial companies face supply strain even though their own products have little to do with AI.

STMicroelectronics chief executive Jean-Marc Chery made a similar warning at a CEO panel ahead of the conference on Monday. He said foundries and chip-packaging companies were increasingly moving resources away from automotive and industrial products. "We see many bottlenecks," Chery said.

Chery said STMicroelectronics' own manufacturing footprint gives it some protection. "We control a part of our future with our CapEx and our manufacturing," he said.

The two companies are exposed in different ways. Nexperia concentrates on high-volume, low-cost, mature-node components and has a narrower product range than larger rivals such as STMicroelectronics, which runs more of its own production. Infineon chief executive Jochen Hanebeck and NXP chief executive Rafael Sotomayor also appeared at the Munich conference.

Tilger said demand from AI data centres and robotics was absorbing capacity, and that the problem had been building for years: investment in the mature technologies used to make diodes, transistors and other basic components has lagged behind.