TSMC prepares more advanced devices for AMD Instinct MI300 series

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) expressed in a recent financial conference call that, to meet the burgeoning demand for chips in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC), it has recently placed additional orders for CoWoS packaging equipment. Perhaps the recent surge in interest in AI has elevated sales expectations, and both TSMC and AMD appear rather optimistic about the anticipated demand for the forthcoming Instinct MI300 series of GPUs/APUs.

According to DigiTimes, the mass production of the Instinct MI300 series may exacerbate the shortage of CoWoS packaging capacity. Industry insiders have conveyed that TSMC anticipates AMD’s new data center products to require half as much CoWoS packaging as Nvidia, an optimistic forecast. It must be recognized that Nvidia’s software stack, built around the CUDA core, has established a dominant position in the fields of AI and HPC. After more than a decade of diligent cultivation, it now commands over 90% of the market for computing accelerator cards.

Beyond Nvidia and AMD, companies such as Amazon, Broadcom, and Xilinx have also successively adopted CoWoS packaging in their data center products, further compelling TSMC to expedite orders for new equipment to meet production needs. It is understood that the delivery time for such manufacturing tools is less than six months, so TSMC should be able to enhance its production capacity before year’s end. There are reports that TSMC plans to increase its existing CoWoS packaging capacity from 8,000 wafers per month to 11,000 by the end of 2023, and further to between 14,500 and 16,600 by the close of 2024. This suggests that by the conclusion of next year, CoWoS packaging capacity might well double.

Some analysts believe TSMC and AMD’s optimism about market demand may be overly sanguine. Unless there are breakthrough advancements, the realization of the established goals may prove elusive.