Friday 9 October 2026
Afternoon EditionRSS
ZOTPAPER

News without the noise

ZOTPAPER
Hardware & Devices

TSMC and GlobalFoundries in $2B deal to build US silicon interposer capacity

New York fab to supply advanced packaging parts for AI chips, easing a domestic bottleneck

By LineZotpaper
Published
Read Time2 min
TSMC has struck a $2 billion partnership with US-based foundry GlobalFoundries to produce silicon interposers at its Malta, New York fab, a step toward closing the advanced packaging bottleneck that still forces American-made AI chips to travel to Taiwan for final assembly.

GlobalFoundries announced the multi-year deal on Thursday. Under the agreement, GloFo will produce silicon interposers for TSMC's chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging specification.

Silicon interposers are essential to multi-die chip assemblies such as GPUs and AI accelerators. They sit beneath the compute logic and memory, providing a higher-speed, lower-power path for communications between chips than conventional organic packaging. Nearly every chip that employs high-bandwidth memory (HBM) relies on an interposer or interconnect bridge.

Advanced packaging has become a major bottleneck for American chip manufacturing. When TSMC began producing Nvidia's Blackwell generation of GPUs at its Arizona plant last year, the finished chips still had to be shipped to Taiwan and back for final assembly.

TSMC has contracted Amkor, an outsourced semiconductor assembly and test provider, for CoWoS-compatible packaging services in the US, and has broken ground on its own advanced packaging facilities in Arizona. Neither facility is expected to come online until 2028 and 2029 respectively. GlobalFoundries plans to add capacity at its Malta plant to meet demand, but volume production will not begin until the first half of 2028 at the earliest. The partnership is expected to last five years with an option to extend.

While CoWoS remains the most popular packaging approach, it is not the only one. Intel Foundry offers both leading-edge process and advanced packaging technology comparable to TSMC's CoWoS offerings, and the technology is compatible with silicon produced at TSMC fabs. Intel routinely packages chips made by TSMC, though designs must be tailored to Intel's packaging. Customers for whom US manufacturing is a priority would not necessarily have to wait for the TSMC and Amkor facilities to come online.

§

Analysis

Why This Matters

  • AI datacenter chips depend on advanced packaging to connect compute dies and memory, and the US currently lacks the domestic capacity to finish them, forcing round trips to Taiwan.
  • The deal gives the US a home-grown source of silicon interposers years before TSMC's own Arizona packaging lines are expected to open.
  • It is a signal of how advanced packaging, not just front-end fabrication, has become a strategic constraint in the global AI chip supply chain.

Background

Advanced packaging has emerged as the new frontier of semiconductor competition as chipmakers shift from single large dies to multi-die designs. Interposers allow many smaller chips to act as a single processor, which is why they are central to AI accelerators pairing compute with high-bandwidth memory. The US has pushed to rebuild domestic chip manufacturing, and TSMC has committed to producing leading-edge chips in Arizona, but packaging capacity has lagged behind wafer production. GlobalFoundries, which operates the Malta, New York fab, is one of the few US-based foundries with the scale to fill that gap.

Key Perspectives

TSMC: Gains a US-based supply of interposers for its CoWoS packaging flow, reducing its reliance on shipping unfinished chips to Taiwan while its own Arizona packaging facilities are under construction. GlobalFoundries: Secures a major customer and a long-term revenue stream, and a reason to expand capacity at Malta, with volume production targeted for the first half of 2028. Intel Foundry: Presents an existing alternative with CoWoS-comparable packaging technology that is compatible with TSMC-made chips, though it requires designing for Intel's packaging standards. Critics/Skeptics: The timelines are long. None of the new capacity, from GlobalFoundries, Amkor or TSMC itself, comes online before 2028, so the US packaging bottleneck persists for at least another two years. Whether the ramp can stay on schedule as AI demand grows remains to be seen.

What to Watch

  • Progress at GlobalFoundries' Malta fab, where volume interposer production is slated for the first half of 2028.
  • Whether the Amkor packaging partnership and TSMC's own Arizona facilities hit their 2028 and 2029 targets.
  • The five-year term of the deal and any decision to extend it, plus whether major customers shift more packaging work to US sites.

Sources

Zotpaper

Written by software from the reporting listed above, scored by an automated standards desk, and published without a person reading it first. If something here is wrong, tell the editor and it will be put right.

How we workSubscribe