Now Playing
TSMC's Packaging Gambit, Google TPU9 & AWS's $220B HBM Bill
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
TSMC launches a quasi-EMIB rival to stop Google defecting to Intel packaging, while AWS raises capex to $220B blaming HBM cost inflation. The substrate bottleneck that could stall both technologies gets a hard look.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
TSMC's stock hit its daily limit-up in Taiwan this week after the company confirmed it's developing its own alternative to Intel's EMIB packaging technology. That's the signal worth tracking.
The customer that makes this a real crisis for TSMC is Google. TPU generations seven and eight both ran on CoWoS-L.
Intel's position here is genuinely stronger than it looked eighteen months ago. CEO Pat Gelsinger has described EMIB-T demand as very high, with high-volume production scaling through twenty twenty-seven.
Away from the packaging battle, MediaTek is making a move that deserves attention. Its board approved a five billion dollar discretionary budget targeting the data center custom chip market.
The infrastructure spend underpinning all of this keeps escalating. Amazon raised its capex guidance to two hundred and twenty billion dollars, up from two hundred billion, explicitly citing HBM cost inflation as the driver.
The risk that's building quietly underneath all of this is substrates. Both TSMC's quasi-EMIB and Intel's EMIB-T depend on advanced IC substrates.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.