Amkor Technology Inc plans to build a US$2 billion semiconductor advanced packaging facility in Arizona, an investment that could generate as many as 2,000 jobs and bolster the Phoenix region’s status as a US chipmaking hub.
The site, in the city of Peoria, is to start production within the next two to three years, the company said in a statement.
It will package chips made for Apple Inc at a US$40 billion fab that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is building in Phoenix.
Amkor is the biggest outsourced provider of semiconductor assembly and testing in the US, and its Peoria plant would be the largest outsourced advanced packaging facility in the country, it said.
Globally, Amkor competes against Taiwan’s ASE Technology Holdings Co (日月光投控) and a coterie of other Asian players, with Malaysia being the international hub for such work.
The 22-hectare Peoria facility is one of more than two dozen announced chip investments in Arizona over the past few years, including a massive expansion by Intel Corp in Chandler.
Amkor has applied for Chips Act funding, the firm said in a statement, adding that federal support would be “critical to Amkor’s project moving forward.”
US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo has said her agency plans to make the first awards by the end of this year.
The Amkor plant would help address a lack of US capacity in packaging — the “special sauce” in chipmaking, in Raimondo’s words, that is set to become the next big chips battleground between Washington and Beijing. The US houses just 3 percent of the world’s packaging capacity compared with China’s 38 percent.
“As one of the first advanced packaging facilities in the US, this is a huge step forward to reducing dependence on other countries in the microchip supply chain,” US Senator Mark Kelly said in a statement.
Apple and TSMC also issued statements of support, citing longstanding packaging partnerships with Amkor.
“We share Amkor’s excitement for its significant investment and the value this facility will bring to TSMC, our customers and the ecosystem,” TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said.
In Taiwan, the company has been working closely with ASE to meet the soaring demand for its CoWoS packaging. That has proven a bottleneck, constraining supply of Nvidia Corp’s class-leading artificial intelligence accelerators.
US President Joe Biden’s administration recently outlined a US$3 billion plan to stimulate the packaging industry. As the transistors on chips become so small that they push the limits of physics, innovation in the semiconductor sector will increasingly focus on how those chips are put together.
Without localized packaging, US-made chips would still have to be shipped to Asia for assembly, creating a supply-chain risk the US “just can’t accept,” US Under Secretary of Commerce Laurie Locascio said earlier this month.
South Korea’s SK Hynix Inc has also said that it plans to invest US$15 billion in a packaging facility in the US, but the company has not selected a site.
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