US chipmaking push still depends on offshore packaging

Nvidia says its American manufacturing network spans 43 states, with TSMC’s Phoenix plant producing Blackwell wafers at volume and a plan to produce up to $500 billion of AI infrastructure in the U.S. over four years alongside partners including TSMC, Foxconn, Wistron, Corning, Coherent, and Amkor. Intel is making a parallel case for domestic design, manufacturing, and advanced packaging across Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, while listing Ohio as a planned site.

The progress is strongest at the wafer stage. TSMC’s Arizona fab still sends 100% of its chips to Taiwan for packaging, including Phoenix-made wafers, and Blackwell uses TSMC’s CoWoS-L packaging with HBM3e made by SK hynix, Samsung, or Micron facilities in Asia. A Blackwell die fabbed in Arizona travels roughly 7,000 miles to be diced, stacked, and mounted before moving through system assembly and returning to a U.S. data center.

Domestic gaps may not close until the next product cycle. Amkor’s Peoria, Arizona campus is a $7 billion, two-phase project with up to 750,000 square feet of cleanroom and roughly $400 million in CHIPS Act funding, with production planned for early 2028. TSMC says its own Arizona packaging site will bring CoWoS and 3D-IC capacity online before 2029, while SK hynix is targeting mass production of HBM4E and HBM5 in the second half of 2028 in Indiana.