TSMC CoWoS Capacity Fully Booked, Driving Clients to Intel's EMIB-T Packaging
TSMC's advanced CoWoS packaging capacity is fully booked through next year with delivery lead times exceeding a year, prompting major tech companies including MediaTek, Meta, SK Hynix, Google, and Nvidia to evaluate or adopt Intel's EMIB-T technology. MediaTek has formally announced that it will use both CoWoS and EMIB-T in parallel to build custom AI ASICs. Back-end advanced packaging bottlenecks have become the primary bottleneck constraining global AI chip supply, despite smooth front-end wafer fabrication. This severe capacity shortage presents Intel Foundry with a major opportunity to win high-profile customers and break TSMC's monopoly in advanced packaging. TSMC's CoWoS orders are reportedly scheduled out to 2027, prompting SK Hynix to evaluate Intel substrates with integrated EMIB to package High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) together with logic dies. Additionally, companies like Broadcom and Meta are evaluating EMIB to reduce packaging costs.
## BACKGROUND
Advanced packaging technologies such as TSMC's CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate) and Intel's EMIB (Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge) allow multiple semiconductor dies—such as compute processors and memory chips—to be integrated side-by-side with high-density interconnections. Because modern AI accelerators are too large to be built on a single monolithic chip, 2.5D advanced packaging has become essential to achieve high performance and memory bandwidth.