Memory‑Chip Shortage Won’t Derail the AI Boom, Says RBC Wealth Expert

When you tune into a CNBC segment on July 21, 2026, you’ll hear a calm, measured voice – Gautam Chadda, executive director at RBC Wealth Management – laying out the state of the memory‑chip market. He doesn’t yell, he explains: the supply chain hiccup that’s choking high‑bandwidth memory (HBM) isn’t going away tomorrow.

According to Chadda, the bottleneck could stretch another six to twelve months. It’s not a guess pulled out of thin air; he’s watching the same constraints that have been gnawing at the industry since last year – limited fab capacity, a scramble for raw silicon and, of course, the relentless appetite of data‑center builders.

What’s fascinating is how he frames the impact on AI. Even as HBM becomes a scarce commodity, the appetite for AI‑enablement and the spending on AI‑infrastructure keep the market’s engine humming. In other words, the AI thesis – that demand for compute will keep soaring – stays intact, despite the chip crunch.

He also turns his gaze east, to South Korea’s equity markets, which have been jittery of late. Some investors have blamed the wobble on a waning AI trade, but Chadda pushes back. He points to “purely technical factors” – a wave of leveraged‑ETF inflows, margin‑loan unwinds and the usual market‑making quirks – as the real culprits.

So, where does that leave investors? If you’re betting on the AI narrative, the message is clear: stay the course. The hardware bottleneck is a timing issue, not a fundamental flaw. And if you’re watching the Korean market, read the price action, not the headlines about AI fatigue.

In short, the scarcity of high‑bandwidth memory is real, it may linger for up to a year, but it isn’t the kind of roadblock that will stall the AI train. RBC’s take is that the long‑term demand curve stays steep, and the short‑term supply squeeze is just… another footnote in a much larger story.