Nvidia Locks Packaging
- Reports say Nvidia has secured roughly half of TSMC's CoWoS advanced packaging capacity. - Those supply commitments reportedly run through 2027 and support projected annual GPU volumes near 850,000 units. - The coverage framed advanced packaging, not wafer starts alone, as the immediate governor of AI hardware supply chains (choicestock.co.kr).
Nvidia has locked up most of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s top-end chip-packaging capacity, shifting the AI hardware bottleneck from wafers to the final assembly step. (cnbc.com) Advanced packaging is the stage that connects multiple chip pieces and high-bandwidth memory into one finished processor package. CNBC reported on April 8 that Nvidia had reserved a majority of TSMC’s most advanced capacity, centered on Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate, or CoWoS. (cnbc.com) A South Korean market report said those commitments run through 2027 and are large enough to support about 850,000 graphics processing units a year. The same report said Nvidia had secured roughly half of TSMC’s CoWoS output. (choicestock.co.kr) TSMC describes CoWoS as one of its 3DFabric advanced packaging services for high-performance computing, the category that includes AI accelerators. In its 2024 annual report, TSMC said CoWoS-S had been in volume production for several years, CoWoS-R entered its second year of volume production in 2024, and CoWoS-L started volume production in 2024. (investor.tsmc.com) The constraint has become more visible as Nvidia ramps Blackwell systems. Nvidia said on April 14, 2025 that Blackwell chip production had started at TSMC’s Phoenix plants in Arizona, while packaging and testing in Arizona would be handled with Amkor and SPIL. (blogs.nvidia.com) TSMC is also still expanding the packaging base itself. CNBC reported the company is building its first U.S. advanced-packaging facilities in Arizona and ramping two new sites in Taiwan, while TSMC packaging executive Paul Rousseau said CoWoS capacity was growing at an 80% compound annual rate. (cnbc.com) That has left rivals looking for alternatives. CNBC reported Intel is pitching its own advanced packaging to outside customers, and Intel says its foundry business offers 2.5D and 3D packaging options including EMIB and Foveros for logic chips and high-bandwidth memory. (cnbc.com) (intel.com) The immediate question is not whether more AI chips can be designed, but where they can be packaged fast enough to ship. Nvidia’s reservations and TSMC’s buildout put that back-end step at the center of the next two years of AI server supply. (cnbc.com) (choicestock.co.kr)
