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Sep 15
TSMC 3nm, 2nm, and CoWoS stay tight as AWS, MediaTek, TPU shift capacity
TSMC's 3nm, 2nm, and CoWoS advanced packaging capacity remained in short supply in late 2026's third quarter, as changes in major customer orders and front-end and back-end supply models prompted the foundry to adjust its advanced capacity allocation. Supply chain sources said Nvidia and Apple continue to dominate TSMC's advanced process and packaging resources, while AWS has recently expanded AI chip tape-outs, giving Annapurna more 3nm capacity.
Samsung Electronics is reportedly testing Micron's most advanced 1γ LPDDR5X memory for possible use in the Galaxy S27 series, as rising costs around next-generation mobile DRAM complicate supply decisions. South Korean media say higher prices for advanced-process chips, plus the prospect of further mobile DRAM increases in the fourth quarter of 2026, are weighing on Samsung's plans.
Apple's acceptance of sharply higher Samsung Electronics memory prices for early 2027 is putting a number on the cost of the AI boom for smartphones. The reported agreement comes just days after Apple limited the iPhone 18 Pro price increase to US$100, highlighting its willingness to absorb part of a historic rise in memory costs to defend shipments and market position.

Micron has demonstrated what it calls the world's first 512GB DDR5 registered dual in-line memory module (RDIMM) across multiple server platforms, doubling the capacity of the 256GB RDIMM it began sampling in May as next-generation systems demand greater memory capacity and bandwidth.

Samsung Electronics is reportedly handing the growth in its commodity memory module business to outside assemblers in Vietnam, India, and the Philippines, a sign of how completely high-bandwidth memory (HBM) has taken over its own packaging space. The shift keeps Samsung's scarce back-end capacity focused on its most profitable products and pushes the geography of its conventional memory supply increasingly outside South Korea.
As AI chip package sizes continue to expand, advanced packaging is moving up the technology ladder. Glass substrate and through-glass via (TGV) technologies have become a new competitive focus for supply chains in the US, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. Players are now positioning themselves around four key steps — glass materials, via drilling, via metallization, and multilayer substrate lamination — to capture opportunities for 2027 and 2028.
Hanmi Semiconductor has reportedly secured an order to supply advanced packaging equipment to Elon Musk's Terafab, marking the first known entry by a South Korean back-end equipment supplier into the planned US semiconductor megaproject.

US memory chip startup Kepler Computing has emerged from stealth after seven years, disclosing US$468 million in total funding and a plan to rethink how high-density memory is manufactured.

AI infrastructure customers are starting to reconsider how much high-bandwidth memory (HBM) needs to be placed alongside accelerators as external memory tiers create new options for storing key-value (KV) cache, according to Astera Labs.

As artificial intelligence (AI) models move from answering questions to autonomously completing multi-step tasks, OpenAI's new model GPT-6 Astra, or Astra, is drawing fresh market attention to hardware demand amid the spread of AI agents. For the memory industry, even if the cost of a single AI task falls, rising usage and broader applications could still lift overall computing and data-access demand, leaving room for growth in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and server DRAM.

Altera, the programmable-chip maker backed by Silver Lake and Intel, has confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the US, positioning the company to tap renewed investor demand for semiconductor and AI-related businesses.

Lens Technology is pushing its precision-glass expertise into two higher-value markets that could reshape its growth profile: Apple-linked foldable devices and Intel-linked through-glass-via (TGV) substrates.