AI boom drives demand for ultra-large packaging as ASICs expected to shift from CoWoS to EMIB

TrendForce’s latest investigations find that the rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence and high performance computing is accelerating demand for heterogeneous integration and making advanced packaging a strategic priority. The research highlights that TSMC’s CoWoS platform is currently the leading solution connecting compute logic, memory, and I/O dies, but changes in customer requirements are driving reconsideration of packaging approaches.

CoWoS operates by using an interposer to connect multiple dies and mount them on a substrate. The platform has diversified into CoWoS-S, CoWoS-R, and CoWoS-L, and TrendForce says demand has been shifting strongly toward CoWoS-L because it incorporates a silicon interposer into the package. The report cites NVIDIA’s Blackwell platform moving toward mass production in 2025 as a factor increasing demand for larger CoWoS-L packages, and it expects that demand to continue with NVIDIA’s upcoming Rubin architecture, which is described as having even larger reticle sizes.

At the same time, cloud service providers are accelerating in-house ASIC development to support more complex functions, which is increasing their packaging size requirements. As those requirements grow, some CSPs are contemplating a shift from TSMC’s CoWoS to Intel’s EMIB to accommodate ultra-large packaging needs. TrendForce frames this as a notable industry dynamic where packaging choices will evolve in response to new compute and memory integration demands driven by Artificial Intelligence workloads and next-generation accelerator architectures.