Supercomputer supply-chain concentration

The accelerator-share and interconnect-share pages show who has the largest slice. This page asks the antitrust-style question directly: how concentrated is the supplier base for each role, and is it getting more or less concentrated over time. As of 2026, accelerator is the most concentrated role in this dataset at an HHI of 4331, held by NVIDIA at 52% of installed Rmax in that role.

Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.

Read the shape, not the spikes. This is the installed base of the 1153 systems in this dataset: a curated seed chosen for supply-chain diversity, not a census of the market. At that sample size one machine entering or leaving service moves a share line by tens of points, so year-to-year jumps are composition effects rather than market events. The multi-year trends are the part worth quoting; the individual steps usually have one system's name on them, and the table view under the chart will tell you which.

Accelerator
CPU
Interconnect
Integrator
Storage

Herfindahl-Hirschman Index per role per year: the sum of squared percentage shares across every supplier active that year, 0 (perfectly split) to 10000 (one supplier holds everything).

Download this chart's data (CSV) ↓

Table view: Supply concentration by role (HHI)

Year	Accelerator	CPU	Interconnect	Integrator	Storage
2008	10000	4551	5249	5422	5808
2009	4257	4335	4578	4240	6434
2010	4854	4960	3623	3025	6378
2011	4928	3342	2516	2312	3896
2012	7200	2843	2630	2992	3529
2013	3288	4011	2341	2369	3093
2014	3317	4369	2322	2240	3140
2015	3308	4785	2205	2047	2871
2016	3630	3797	1704	1680	2461
2017	3333	4824	1730	1695	2325
2018	5560	3830	2733	1852	3055
2019	6320	3996	3038	1765	3020
2020	6970	2495	3019	1581	2554
2021	7488	2476	3270	1353	2245
2022	4621	4011	3483	3051	3879
2023	3577	3807	3877	2906	2696
2024	3983	3793	4405	3844	4501
2025	4279	3390	4254	3369	3777
2026	4331	2847	3460	2908	4087

How this was calculated

For each role and each year, every system in service that year contributes its Rmax to its role's supplier, rolled up to the corporate parent that owns that supplier today. A system with more than one supplier in a role splits its Rmax evenly between them. The HHI is the sum of each supplier's squared percentage share that year: US antitrust guidance treats a market above 2500 as highly concentrated and above 1500 as moderately concentrated, which is the convention used here, not a scale specific to this site.

Computed from every supplier, not the eight-series capped form the accelerator-share and interconnect-share charts use for legibility. Folding a long tail of small suppliers into one "Other" band before squaring would understate concentration, since "Other" here is really several small suppliers, not one mid-sized one.

Systems with no supplier recorded for a given role (the CPU-only band on the accelerator-share page) are left out of that role's denominator entirely. This page measures concentration among the suppliers that exist for a role, not how widely the role itself is adopted; the accelerator-share and interconnect-share pages already cover adoption.

This is the installed base of the 1153 systems in this dataset, a curated seed, not a census of the market. A market this small moves HHI by hundreds of points on a single large procurement, which is itself the finding: real HPC and AI-cluster supply chains are this concentrated.

Where each role sits today

Role	HHI (2026)	Concentration	Leading supplier	Share	Suppliers
Accelerator	4331	Highly concentrated	NVIDIA	52.4%	9
CPU	2847	Highly concentrated	AMD	39.7%	14
Interconnect	3460	Highly concentrated	Hewlett Packard Enterprise	43.9%	23
Integrator	2908	Highly concentrated	Hewlett Packard Enterprise	50.3%	46
Storage	4087	Highly concentrated	Hewlett Packard Enterprise	61.0%	17

The read

Every one of these five roles sits above the "highly concentrated" antitrust threshold of 2500 in this dataset, and most sit well above it. That is not unique to any one supplier; it is close to structural for leadership-class compute, where a handful of firms can build at the frontier at all and a single large procurement is a meaningful fraction of the year's total installed base.

Integrator concentration looks highest, and reads as an artefact of history as much as market power: Cray's acquisition by HPE, and SGI's before it, folded what were once several independent system builders into one corporate parent. The accelerator role tells a cleaner story: fewer historical mergers, and its concentration is closer to being a live market outcome than a rollup effect.

Read this alongside domestic substitution and public-market exposure: concentration by role is "how many suppliers exist", substitution is "how many countries can build without a foreign supplier at all", and exposure is "which ticker actually carries that concentration".