What does delicious Asian food seasoning have to do with a potential bottleneck for AI chips?

Deep within the supply chain for advanced AI chips sits an unlikely company that may be the source of a looming global bottleneck. It’s already the source of some really delicious food.

Ajinomoto is a 117-year-old Japanese food flavoring company that made its name selling monosodium glutamate. You know it better as MSG, the substance that gives some food its umami taste.

Today, the company sells a wide range of food-related goods, healthcare products, and industrial materials — and that’s where Ajinomoto’s business intersects with the worldwide frenzy for AI chips.

One of the industrial materials Ajinomoto sells is Ajinomoto Build-up Film (ABF), a resin-based insulation film that sits in the sandwich of layers in today’s increasingly dense computing chips. Some investors are pushing the company to seize the moment and significantly raise prices on the product, taking advantage of its dominant position in the niche market, where it reportedly has a 95% market share.

But being the sole supplier of a key component in one of the most in-demand pieces of AI technology is also raising fears that Ajinomoto won’t be able to scale fast enough to meet soaring demand.

Last month, Ajinomoto said it would invest over $150 million by 2030 to increase ABF manufacturing capacity by 50%, to ramp up to meet demand. Ajinomoto President Shigeo Nakamura told Nikkei Asia that the company is preparing to continue to scale production, and expects sales of the product to grow steadily:

“We expect sales of electronics materials, mainly ABF, to grow at an annual rate of more than 10% through 2030. We will continue to meet needs by evolving ABF to a more highly functional form that supports high-performance semiconductors in the long term.”