Intel's advanced packaging technology "EMIB" has taken the mound as a relief pitcher to break through the massive bottleneck in the artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor market. With major customers such as Nvidia scrambling to secure TSMC's packaging lines, there is growing assessment that Intel, touting design flexibility and expense efficiency, has begun to crack the TSMC-centered solo lead.
Analysts say Intel, which had fallen behind in the race for finer process nodes, has thrown a do-or-die pitch to rebuild its foundry (contract chip manufacturing) business with packaging as its weapon. Packaging is the process of stacking and consolidation of completed semiconductor chips onto a substrate to make a single product, and its importance has grown as the production pace of AI Semiconductor increasingly hits a "bottleneck" at this stage. Rather than shrinking chips further, the core competitive edge now lies in how efficiently multiple chips are stitched together, which determines overall performance.
According to foreign media and industry sources on the 11th, Intel is expanding its EMIB (Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge) advanced packaging business into the trillions of won, taking aim at a market long led by TSMC. David Zinsner, Intel's chief financial officer (CFO), said in a recent presentation to investors that packaging-related contracts initially expected to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars could grow to several billion dollars annually, hinting that multibillion-dollar advanced packaging deals are within reach.
In particular, Intel has established a mass-production system centered on "Fab 9" in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, which recently ramped up operations, and is expanding partnerships with major customers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cisco as it seeks to achieve foundry revenue early. In addition to Rio Rancho in the United States, Intel is building a large-scale advanced packaging hub in Penang, Malaysia, diversifying its global supply chain. The Penang fab, in particular, concentrates Intel's traditional back-end process know-how and is expected to serve as a key base supporting next-generation EMIB mass production.
This shift stems from the fact that demand for AI Semiconductor has exploded, pushing TSMC's packaging capacity to its limits. Major customers for AI graphics processing units (GPUs), including Nvidia, are said to be waiting from several months to around a year to secure TSMC's "CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate)" production slots. CoWoS is TSMC's key 2.5D packaging technology that places a logic chip and high bandwidth memory (HBM) side by side on a silicon plate (interposer) for consolidation, and it is effectively the "de facto standard" for making AI chips today. Concerned about delays in this process, global fabless (chip design) companies have begun actively considering Intel as a "second source."
Technically, Intel's EMIB also packs a powerful weapon. Unlike TSMC's approach of placing all chips on a large silicon plate, Intel inserts very small "silicon bridges" only where consolidation is needed. This method is not only flexible in design but also reduces the use of expensive silicon, giving it an edge in expense efficiency. Especially as the "chiplet" structure that binds GPUs and memory into one has become mainstream, analysts say it is advantageous for boosting both data transfer speeds and power efficiency.
Geopolitical advantages in the supply chain also work in Intel's favor. Even AI chips designed in the United States often must be sent overseas, including to Taiwan, for final packaging, but Intel is seen as virtually the only top-tier supplier with a supply chain capable of handling everything from manufacturing to advanced packaging in the United States. For major corporations such as Apple and Qualcomm seeking to reduce geopolitical risk, Intel's "Made in USA" supply chain is an attractive alternative.
A semiconductor industry official said, "TSMC's market dominance is still overwhelming, but the center of competition in AI Semiconductor is gradually shifting to packaging and system architecture," adding, "It is worth watching whether Intel can use its advanced packaging business as a springboard to create a turning point in the foundry market."