Warning: Chip shortage!

A warning of a huge surge in demand for multi-layer ceramic chip capacitors (MLCCs) has been issued by Anglia Components. The company is advising customers that they need to get order coverage in place ASAP to prevent supply issues later in the year as the situation is expected to tighten severely.

Steve Rawlins, Anglia CEO (right) discloses “We are now turning away demand from brokers, in order to conserve our inventories so that we can support our loyal customer base in the Britain and Europe. We’ve been warning of shortages all year and now MLCCs have joined bellwether parts such as tantalum capacitors and small signal discretes on the shortages list.”

The surge in demand is being driven primarily by the AI datacentre buildout. Although this may seem counter-intuitive since data centres tend to use higher value MLCC products, the reality is that the production capacity for the more standard products that many customers do use is being shared with, or moved, to making the higher end products. Hence the constraint in capacity. For context, one AI data centre rack can use upwards of 440K MLCCs to manage the huge power delivery requirements of the boards. 

The company holds a strong profile of MLCCs from leading global suppliers including Murata, Samsung, AVX and TDK. The company has innovative inventory management programs to help users manage the inevitable shortages that will occur in the next few months, but urges customers to react quickly.

“Don’t make it easy for a broker to buy his next Lamborghini”, says Rawlins. “Schedule your orders with us now, and we’ll flex with you as your demand changes.”

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