Citrini Insights: NVIDIA's Moat Remains Strong, HBM4 Cost Doubling Drives Rubin Price to $80,000, High Gross Margin and Pricing Power Unaffected

July 28th, Citrini analyst Jukan quoted the Fubon Securities report "2027 Semiconductor Outlook," pointing out that although the cost of HBM4 will significantly increase from HBM3e's $17-18/GB to $31-32/GB by 2026, pushing the price of NVIDIA's Rubin GPU to around $78,000 to $80,000, NVIDIA can still maintain a high gross margin level of 75% to 80%. Its pricing power and cost pass-through ability remain unshaken. The report also mentioned that the HBM cost for custom ASICs may be even higher, reaching $35-36/GB, indicating that HBM costs will double by 2027.

The Fubon Securities report remains optimistic about the AI market demand, believing that despite recent concerns about AI inflation, Token costs are still a more critical factor driving capital expenditure for cloud service providers. At the architecture level, NVIDIA's new rack still plans to use the same number of compute chips, scale-up within the rack will still be done with cables, and scale-out between racks will be done using NPO/CPO. In addition, Google plans to deploy 12 to 15 million TPUs in 2028, with capacity consumption more than doubling from 2027; Intel's EMIB capacity is expected to increase to 24,000 to 25,000 wafers per month by the end of 2027, while TSMC will slow down SoIC expansion to prioritize expanding CoWoS capacity.

The core conclusion is: Despite changes in the cost structure, NVIDIA's pricing power, gross margin, and demand support in the AI computing ecosystem have still built formidable competitive barriers.