Three verbs kept apart for the queue at the foundry. Capacity is booked by money laid down years ahead, allocated among the buyers who booked, and rationed by lead times when demand still exceeds it. Chapter 5.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
The book uses this term in a sense of its own.
Where the book uses it
- Chapter 5 — The Island in Every Machine
Why every accelerator runs through Taiwan: the foundry, the packaging and the memory that are booked years ahead, and what that does to anyone arriving late with cash.
Where the record uses it
- Scorecard indicator Post-2024 METR horizon doubling time
- Scorecard indicator Autonomous research outer loop
- Scorecard indicator Large-frame gas turbine lead
- Scorecard indicator CoWoS
- Scorecard indicator HBM
- Scorecard indicator CoreWeave 2026 borrowing spread ladder
- Scorecard indicator OpenAI + Anthropic annualized revenue
Also discussed in
- Chapter notes Chapter 5 — The Island in Every Machine
Sources that use it
- Samsung Electronics, third-quarter 2026 results, newsroom release, 29 October 2026 (“The full-year capital expenditure for 2026 is expected at approximately KRW 84.4 trillion, including KRW 76.8 trillion allocated to the DS Division and KRW 3.9 trillion to SDC”; “increasing AI-driven demand will far exceed the industry supply in comparison with 2026”) In the Sources
- TrendForce, “TSMC Reportedly Eyes 2H27 3nm Mass Production at Arizona Fab 2, Four U.S. Fabs Said to Be Fully Booked,” 24 March 2026 (fab 2’s 3-nanometer mass production “as early as” the second half of 2027; for sub-2-nanometer nodes a capacity mix of roughly 70 percent Taiwan and 30 percent United States by 2030; this report carries no $165 billion figure; the step from $165 billion to $265 billion is TSMC’s own, given on its second-quarter 2026 earnings call in July 2026). In the Sources
- TSMC, first-quarter 2024 earnings call transcript, 18 April 2024 (the 3 April Hualien earthquake: more than 70 percent of tools recovered within ten hours, all tools by the end of the third day, no damage to EUV equipment, some wafers scrapped, about 50 basis points off second-quarter gross margin; priority is customers’ success regardless of which customer; OSATs as a complement to TSMC’s own advanced-packaging expansion; C. C. Wei in prepared remarks: “We forecast the revenue contribution from server AI processors to more than double this year and account for low-teens percent of our total revenue in 2024”; C. C. Wei on CoWoS capacity, answering an analyst: “the demand is very, very strong, and we have done our best where we put all the effort to increase the capacity. It’s probably more than double this year as compared with last year. However, it’s still not enough to meet the customers’ demand, and we leverage our OSAT partners to complement of TSMC’s capacity to fulfill our customers’ need.”; C. C. Wei on how CoWoS capacity is allocated: “my first priority is to make our customer to be successful, no matter which one. And of course, the long-term partners will have a better cooperation with TSMC in terms of technology and process complexity, so much easier to be ramped up”). In the Sources
- Oregon Laws 2025, chapter 323 (House Bill 3546), “Relating to large energy use facilities”, effective 16 June 2025 (a large energy use facility “uses or is able to use 20 megawatts or more” and is primarily engaged in a service under NAICS code 518210; the commission gives such facilities a class of their own, whose costs are allocated “in a manner that is equal or proportional to the costs of serving the class” or directly assigned; a contract must “be for a duration for 10 years or longer” and “Obligate the retail electricity consumer to pay a minimum amount or percentage, as determined by the commission”). In the Sources
- PJM Interconnection, L.L.C., “Reliability Backstop Procurement to Address Resource Adequacy and Large Loads,” section 205 filing, FERC Docket ER26-3380-000, 31 July 2026 (requested effective date 29 September 2026; PJM to open the procurement window on 30 September 2026 if the framework is accepted by 29 September; commitments for fixed terms of up to fifteen years, from the 2028/2029 to the 2042/2043 delivery year; MW-weighted average levelized procurement cost capped at $555 per MW-day UCAP; on who pays, at page 99: “if no allocation is reported by the relevant Electric Distributors with allocated RBP UCAP MW, PJM will allocate RBP Charges based on the Peak Load Contribution submitted to PJM for the LSEs in the relevant zone/area”, and “PJM is not proposing a backup methodology for how RBP Charges should be allocated to non-jurisdictional, retail customers”; of the stakeholders’ advisory votes of 30 June 2026: “Of the 13 proposals, only the voluntary RBP framework proposed by the Joint Electric Distribution Companies and Data Center Coalition” “received greater than two-thirds sector-weighted member support”, and the Board “concluded that a voluntary subscription framework would not provide sufficient assurance that capacity equal to the identified near-term shortfall would actually be procured”; on its origin, at page 2: the backstop is “one part of a multi-pronged implementation of the Statement of Principles Regarding PJM issued on January 16, 2026”, by the National Energy Dominance Council and the 13 governors of the PJM states, which urged an auction “commencing no later than September 2026” and to “[p]rovide 15-year price certainty for new capacity resources”); Federal Register notice of the filing, 6 August 2026, at the second address, the filing itself at the first. In the Sources
And 9 more: search the Sources.
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Booked, allocated, rationed.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/booked-allocated-rationed (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-booked-allocated-rationed-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Booked, allocated, rationed}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/booked-allocated-rationed},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}