TSMC Plans to Raise CoWoS Advanced Packaging Prices by 10%-20%, Nvidia and AMD Face Cost Pressure
According to a report by Taiwan's Commercial Times citing supply chain sources, TSMC is considering raising prices for advanced packaging processes by 10% to 20%, with the core product being the CoWoS packaging technology used to integrate chips with HBM. The report says TSMC's monthly CoWoS capacity is expected to exceed 130,000 wafers in 2026 and further increase to more than 200,000 wafers in 2027. The price increase will directly push up production costs for major chip companies such as Nvidia and AMD, and Apple's hardware products may also come under pressure from the combined packaging and memory costs.
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The report provides the CoWoS price increase range and the capacity ramp-up timetable, which can be used to observe the cost transmission path in the AI chip supply chain.
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According to a report by Taiwan, China's Commercial Times citing supply chain sources, TSMC is considering raising the prices of its advanced packaging processes by 10% to 20%. If implemented, this move will directly push up production costs for major chipmakers such as Nvidia and AMD, and may further drive up the end-user prices of Apple's iPhone and MacBook—Apple products have already been under some pressure from rising memory chip prices.
CoWoS demand overflows, tight capacity triggers price increase
The core product for which TSMC plans to raise prices this time is CoWoS (Chip on Wafer on Substrate) packaging technology.
This technology integrates chips with high-bandwidth memory (HBM) into a single package and is an indispensable key process for current high-end AI accelerator chips.
The Commercial Times reported that in terms of capacity expansion, TSMC is continuing to ramp up CoWoS capacity: monthly capacity is expected to exceed 130,000 wafers in 2026 and is expected to further increase to more than 200,000 wafers in 2027.
Cost pressure is transmitted down the supply chain
As the world's largest wafer foundry, TSMC's pricing decisions have a significant impact on the entire semiconductor supply chain. In addition to Nvidia and AMD, its main customers also include chip design giants such as Broadcom, Qualcomm and MediaTek.
The rise in packaging costs has a particularly direct impact on Nvidia—Nvidia's data center GPUs are highly dependent on CoWoS packaging technology, and the price increase will squeeze its product gross margins or force downstream customers to bear higher procurement costs. For Apple, if packaging costs rise and are compounded by the previously increased memory chip prices, the cost pressure on its hardware products may further intensify.
In addition to the news of the packaging price increase, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's earlier bearish remarks on the emerging cloud services (neocloud) sector also weighed on a number of cloud computing and AI-related stocks on Monday. Risk disclosure and disclaimer
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