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Monosodium glutamate (MSG) products of the Ajinomoto food company displayed at a supermarket in Tokyo on January 20, 2020 (Behrouz Mehri/Getty Images)

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

Japanese food flavoring company Ajinomoto, which commercialized MSG, also makes a key component in AI chips. It’s having trouble scaling to meet demand.

Jon Keegan

4/13/26 1:20PM

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.”

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5