The Company That Invented MSG Controls 95% of a Film Every AI Chip Needs. It Just Raised the Price 30%.
Every advanced chip package — the thing an Nvidia GPU actually sits on — is built from alternating layers of copper wiring and an insulating film. Ajinomoto, the Japanese seasoning company, makes more than 95% of that film. Demand from AI accelerators has outrun its ability to supply it.
Build an AI chip's substrate, one ABF layer at a time
Simplified cross-section, not to scale: each build-up layer alternates a copper routing layer with a sheet of ABF dielectric film. A PC chip's substrate needs about 4-6 layers; a 2026-class AI accelerator needs 8-16. This model scales film use with layer count only — real AI packages are also physically larger, which is why reported film consumption per package runs 10-18x a PC chip's, higher than the layer count alone implies. Drag the slider, pick a preset, or press Build.
The plain version
Here's a strange supply-chain fact: the company that invented MSG — the savory seasoning in your instant ramen — also makes one of the most important materials in every AI chip on Earth.
Inside an Nvidia GPU package, the chip doesn't sit directly on a circuit board. It sits on a "substrate" — a hyper-miniaturized circuit board built in alternating layers, like a club sandwich, so thousands of microscopic wires can route signals between the chip and the memory stacked beside it. Each layer of that sandwich needs an insulating film to separate the copper wiring underneath from the wiring above. That film is called ABF — Ajinomoto Build-up Film — and Ajinomoto, the 100-plus-year-old Japanese seasoning company, controls more than 95% of the world's supply.
A phone or laptop chip needs maybe 4 to 6 of these layers. A 2026-class AI accelerator, crammed with memory and routing to match, needs 8 to 16 — and reported figures put total film use per AI package at 10 to 18 times that of an ordinary chip, once you account for the layers and the larger package size. Demand has outrun Ajinomoto's ability to supply it: in May, the company told substrate makers it was raising ABF prices 30%, effective this quarter, and analysts expect the supply-demand gap to more than quadruple by 2028. Building new capacity isn't fast either — Ajinomoto's next major expansion reportedly isn't due until 2028.
So next time someone says AI is bottlenecked on chips, remember: sometimes it's bottlenecked on a seasoning company's insulating tape.
The expert version
ABF — Ajinomoto Build-up Film — is a proprietary epoxy-resin dielectric film used to build the organic build-up substrates underneath every flip-chip BGA package, including the packages inside TSMC's CoWoS flow and every competing AI-accelerator packaging process. A substrate is built additively: a copper layer is patterned, an ABF sheet is laminated over it as the insulating dielectric, microvias are laser-drilled through the film to connect to the layer below, and the sequence repeats. A consumer PC or phone chip's substrate typically needs 4 to 6 of these ABF layers. A 2026-class AI accelerator package — routing thousands of high-speed I/O connections between a large logic die and several adjacent HBM stacks — needs 8 to 16 layers, and industry estimates put total ABF consumption per AI package at 10 to 18 times a standard chip's, reflecting both layer count and larger die/package area.
Ajinomoto holds a reported 95%-plus global share of ABF film, a position built over roughly three decades of process-qualification work that makes near-term substitution difficult — a rival film has to be re-qualified against each substrate maker's existing line, itself a year-plus process. In May 2026, Ajinomoto notified substrate manufacturers of a roughly 30% ABF price increase effective Q3 2026 (first reported by DigiTimes), citing AI-driven demand. Analysts at Goldman Sachs project the global ABF substrate supply-demand gap widening from roughly 10% in the second half of 2026 to 21% in 2027 and 42% in 2028, even as Taiwanese substrate fabricators — Unimicron, Kinsus, Nan Ya PCB — run near full utilization. Ajinomoto's reported capacity-expansion plans add no meaningful new supply until 2028, with a third dedicated plant not expected online before 2032, keeping pricing power concentrated upstream of TSMC, Nvidia, and every other chip designer. Separately, Chinese trade outlets reported in August that Ajinomoto would cut ABF allocations to mainland Chinese customers by 30%; Ajinomoto has not confirmed this, and whether it reflects AI-demand rationing or friction over China's own rare-earth export curbs remains unverified.
Why it matters for tech + supply chain: a dependency most AI investors have never heard of — a single Japanese chemical film, not a chip fab — may be setting the real ceiling on how many AI accelerators the world can build through 2028.
Why it matters for tech + supply chain: wafer capacity and HBM supply get most of the attention, but ABF is a single-supplier, slow-to-requalify material sitting underneath every advanced package — worth tracking alongside CoWoS and HBM as a third, under-discussed AI hardware bottleneck.