Money paid in advance
A shortage shows up in prices and lead times, but both are easy to talk about and hard to verify. Money paid in advance is different. When customers wire cash to a supplier for capacity they will not receive for a year or more, the supplier has to book it, and the balance sheet says how much.
In mid-2026 that number moved at three of the four companies that sit closest to the AI hardware bottleneck.
| Company | Line item, as filed | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TSMC | Temporary receipts from customers (payments to retain its capacity) | NT$149.7B (Mar 31) | NT$234.2B (Jun 30) | +56%; part due beyond 12 months NT$32.0B → NT$92.4B |
| Samsung Electronics | Contract liabilities (company-wide) | ₩15.09T (Mar 31) | ₩23.59T (Jun 30) | +56% |
| Micron | Non-current customer contract liabilities | $568M (May 28) | $12,895M (Sep 3) | about 23x; $142M a year earlier |
| SK hynix | Contract liabilities (consolidated) | ₩474.2B (Dec 31, 2025) | ₩523.5B (Jun 30) | about +10% |
Three caveats matter. TSMC's and Samsung's lines are company-wide, so they cannot be pinned to CoWoS or to HBM. Samsung's caption also includes accrued expenses and other current liabilities, not only prepayments. Micron changed its presentation in the September quarter, adding a new non-current balance-sheet line and restating the May comparative from the $422M its 10-Q reported to $568M, a difference the filings do not reconcile; we use the comparatives in its September filing. We report each figure as filed and do not convert currencies.
The text next to the numbers is as telling as the numbers. Samsung's June notes add that it "has entered into multi-year agreements with multiple global customers for the supply of memory semiconductor products." Micron's management put its customer cash deposits at $12.7B and total customer financial commitments at $32B across 26 strategic agreements. TSMC's deposits had been falling for five straight quarters, from NT$291.1B at the end of 2024, before turning in the second quarter.
SK hynix is the exception. On its July call it said it had concluded long-term agreements with about ten customers and that "financial mechanisms such as deposits are incorporated." Its June 30 statements do not show them yet. Either the cash arrives later, it sits in a line we have not found, or the amounts are small. The third-quarter statements will tell.
The buyer side shows the same step. In its 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, NVIDIA wrote that it had "significantly increased our supply and capacity commitments from $119 billion last quarter to $279 billion." The filing does not split that by supplier.
The prepayments also reach further up the chain, where fewer people look:
- Ibiden, the IC-substrate maker, reported advances received of ¥154.5B at June 30, up from ¥81.0B three months earlier, and named them the main reason its liabilities rose.
- AXT, which makes the indium phosphide wafers that AI optical lasers are built on, disclosed long-term agreements requiring about $47.7M in advance payments, of which about $12.7M had arrived by June 30. Lumentum had said on its August call that it was looking to AXT for more substrate.
- Advantest's cash-flow statement shows advance receipts up ¥37.0B in April–June, against ¥1.4B a year earlier. It gives no balance and does not tie the cash to specific agreements.
- Not everyone shows it. Coherent's contract liabilities were flat at $63M, and Nittobo's statements carry no separate line.
The map
We track eight points where AI accelerator supply can stall. Each carries five standard numbers — lead time, price change, share of next year's output under contract, customer deposits and capacity — and every number carries a source grade: A for filings and the company's own words, B for two independent outlets with their own reporting, C for a single outlet, D for re-written echo. A state moves only on A or B evidence.
| Point in the chain | State | Strongest evidence | What would change it |
|---|---|---|---|
| CoWoS-L (TSMC) | Allocated | TSMC's CEO, Jul 16: "Our packaging capacity is so tight that now it's limiting my customers' growth." (A) | The wording on TSMC's Q3 call (Oct 15) |
| HBM | Allocated | Micron, Sep 30: agreements cover "the vast majority" of its calendar-2027 HBM bit supply, and more than 75% of its 2027 output is already committed (A). HBM3E contract prices about +20% in 2026; blended HBM prices about +120% for 2027 (B) | SK hynix's Q3 balance sheet; the start of 2028 negotiations |
| TSMC N3 | Watch | TSMC is adding three N3 fabs for a "multi-year" demand pipeline (A); price-rise reports are single-sourced (C) | A dated lead-time or utilization statement |
| HBM base die → foundry logic | Watch | HBM4/HBM4E base dies move onto foundry logic processes (C) | Confirmation of the HBM4E base-die process |
| Large ABF substrates | Allocated | Ibiden, an IC-substrate specialist, nearly doubled its customer advances in one quarter, from ¥81.0B to ¥154.5B (March → June 2026), the main reason its liabilities rose (A). No confirmed price rise (see below) | Ibiden's next quarterly advances; a substrate price change confirmed by the makers |
| T-glass (low-CTE glass cloth) | Tight | Prices +20–30% and laminate lead times from 8–10 to 20+ weeks (B); Nittobo holds about 90% (B) | Nittobo's FY2027 mass-production start |
| Test equipment (ATE) | Balanced | Teradyne kept 12–16-week lead times while more than doubling shipments (A) | An Advantest lead-time figure |
| InP lasers (pump, high-power) | Sold out, open-ended | Lumentum, Aug 11: "effectively sold out for the foreseeable future" (A); it needs more InP substrate (A) | InP substrate supply |
Two states have moved since our first judgment: test equipment from tight to balanced, on Teradyne's unchanged lead times, and large ABF substrates from watch to allocated, on Ibiden's customer advances. The earlier states stay in the ledger.
Three claims that did not survive the filings
The 30% ABF film price rise. A May 13 report said Ajinomoto had told substrate makers it would raise ABF film prices by about 30% from the third quarter. The story spread, and in October we still found at least eight outlets reporting it as confirmed. Ajinomoto Fine-Techno's website carries a notice, undated on the page and dated May 15 by its address, saying that despite media reports of an ABF price revision, "no such facts exist." In a June interview with the Wall Street Journal, chief executive Shigeo Nakamura said raising prices because other materials had risen would damage customer relationships, and that the company would add capacity instead.
The two-year T-glass delay. An August report framed Nittobo's plan as tripling capacity "by FY2029." Nittobo's own documents say otherwise: its August 2025 notice put first production in January–March 2027, its May 2026 plan revision says it is executing the low-CTE glass investment ahead of schedule, and its August 2026 results deck still shows FY2027 mass production in Japan and Taiwan. "2029" does not appear in the deck.
"CoWoS sold out through 2026." The line is attributed to TSMC across the web. We searched the transcripts of TSMC's January, April and July 2026 calls and did not find it. What TSMC's CEO did say is the quote in the table above: capacity is so tight that it limits customers' growth. That is a rationing statement, not a sold-out statement. Our own allocation page repeated the stronger version; we have corrected it, and our CoWoS lead-time analysis now rests on the same filings.
What we make of it
For a buyer, the deposit lines change the question from "is it tight?" to "who has already paid to be first?" A company that has not prepaid is negotiating for what is left after the customers that have. That makes deposits a procurement-planning input, not a forecast.
Three dated checkpoints can move this map next: TSMC's third-quarter call on October 15, SK hynix's and Samsung's third-quarter statements in late October, and the start of Nittobo's FY2027 T-glass production. Each move will be recorded with its date and source, and the earlier state kept.
How we grade
Every number on this map links to its source and carries a grade. A state is computed from A and B numbers by published rules; a human judgment that differs is recorded with its reason. Deposits move a state on their own only at a company whose main business is that point in the chain, such as Ibiden for substrates. At diversified companies such as TSMC or Samsung they are company-wide, so we show them as a signal and let them move nothing. When a claim fails against a primary source, we keep it in the record, marked, rather than delete it. Figures are as filed through October 3, 2026.