System Information

Illustrator Version - 30.6

Operating System
macOS Tahoe - V 26.5.2

Hardware
Apple M1 Max

I have identified what appears to be an undocumented rendering limitation or bug affecting very large linked raster images in Adobe Illustrator.
Illustrator successfully creates the link and the object appears in the document, however the linked image renders completely blank. No warning or error message is displayed.
After extensive testing, the behaviour appears to correlate only with the total pixel count of an individual linked image, rather than file format, colour mode, GPU settings or computer hardware.
The behaviour has also been reproduced on other Macs with different hardware specifications.

Image Details

Original image:
TIFF
8-bit
CMYK
72ppi
LZW compression (also tested with ZIP and Uncompressed)
Linked (not embedded)

The issue also occurs when saved as:
PSD
PSB

Expected Result
The linked image should display correctly.

Actual Result
The image link is created successfully.
The image occupies the correct size on the artboard.
The Links panel reports no errors.
However, the image itself is completely blank.
No warning or error message is displayed.

Troubleshooting Performed

The following changes did not resolve the issue:
CPU Preview
GPU Preview
GPU Performance disabled
TIFF → PSD
TIFF → PSB
RGB instead of CMYK
CMYK instead of RGB
LZW compression
ZIP compression
Uncompressed TIFF
Multiple Macs

Test Results

Image Dimensions Total Pixels Result
17,803 × 23,737 422.5 MP Blank
14,000 × 20,350 284.9 MP Blank
16,500 × 16,500 272.3 MP Blank
16,384 × 16,384 268.4 MP Blank
16,100 × 16,100 259.2 MP Displays correctly
13,351 × 20,013 267.2 MP Displays correctly

Resampling the image below approximately 260–267 megapixels consistently restores normal behaviour.
Changing only the image dimensions while keeping the total pixel count similar does not affect the result.
This suggests the limitation is based on total pixels per linked image, rather than width or height.

Why I believe this is a bug

If Illustrator has a maximum supported raster size, I would expect:
an error message when placing the image,
or a warning that the image exceeds the supported limit.

Instead, Illustrator:
accepts the file,
creates a valid link,
displays the correct object size,
but renders the image completely blank.

This behaviour makes it difficult to determine whether the file is corrupt or whether Illustrator has exceeded an internal rendering limit.

Suggested Improvement

If there is an internal maximum raster size, Illustrator should:
document the limitation,
warn the user when placing the file,
or generate a reduced-resolution preview while preserving the full-resolution linked image for output.

A blank image with no warning is misleading and difficult to diagnose.

I've used chat CPT to diagnose this issue as I couldn't see anyone reporting the same issue.

Thank you for your time.