An urgent order from Nvidia! What signal does it give?

Taiwan Electronic Times reported on May 11, a person familiar with the advanced closed test supply chain revealed that Nvidia's subsequent AI top measure chip demand for ChatGPT and related applications increased significantly, but because of the need for a full line of advanced packaging capacity, urgent order to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., CoWoS advanced packaging capacity, the annual estimate of about 10,000 more than the original level.

Although Nvidia has obtained TSMC's promise, due to advanced packaging capacity also needs to be planned in advance, TSMC's CoWoS production capacity is only about 8000-9000 tablets per month. If more than a few months are provided to Nvidia, about 1000-2000 pieces of CoWoS production capacity will be allocated to Nvidia every month. By then, TSMC CoWoS production capacity will continue to be tight.

In addition, the advanced closed test supply chain industry also pointed out that the AI chip field is currently divided into Microsoft and non-Microsoft camp. Microsoft camp is seeking AMD, while Google and Amazon are also seeking external chips or developing chips to enter the AI HPC field. But all sides are actively pushing for TSMC's advanced processes and packaging, especially CoWoS technology, which has made great achievements in the HPC sector.

It is understood that the internal advanced packaging department of Taiwan Semiconductor Industry highly optimistic about the follow-up growth of CoWoS technology, mainly to take the strong growth train of HPC, AI wave brought benefits, has made the semiconductor economic downturn situation, capacity demand is still relatively tight.

The industry also speculated that due to the relative maturity and stability of the mobile phone market, the future expansion of TSMC's advanced packaging capacity will focus on CoWoS technology, supplemented by 3D wafer stacked SOics. The "SoIC+CoWoS" of front and back 3D integration is still the key point to solve the problem of Moore's Law slowdown in HPC chips in the future.

In addition to overcoming the hurdle of advanced packaging capacity, Nvidia also needs to think about how the HBM3 is currently supported, semiconductor market analysts said. After all, as the storage industry is also slowing down, Samsung Electronics and Micron are also slowing down their efforts to promote HBMS. Only SK Hynix is continuing to promote HBM3, which will affect the subsequent heterogeneous integration of HPC and HBM.

However, at a time when the entire semiconductor industry is still facing inventory problems, the emergence of AI HPC and the relatively hot demand for advanced packaging CoWoS production capacity are certain trends. In addition, also out of the Taiwan system packaging related equipment manufacturers have been informed, and ready to action.