As market fears mount over waning Big Tech spending and calls to slow down frontier artificial intelligence development, Asia-Pacific semiconductor foundries are better positioned to withstand a potential downturn in AI investment than other tech hardware firms in the region, according to S&P Global Ratings.
In a report published on Thursday, the rating agency said it had stress tested four key Asia-Pacific sectors – foundries, memory manufacturers, cooling component suppliers and original design manufacturers that assemble servers – against two downside scenarios for the AI boom.
The first possibility involved a drop in capital expenditure from major hyperscalers like Amazon and Microsoft. The second stemmed from bottlenecks that could delay AI projects, such as power grid constraints and land scarcity.
