Recently, Charlie Boyle, Vice President and General Manager of NVIDIA's DGX Systems, responded to the issue of limited GPU supply in the company.
Charlie Boyle stated that the current GPU shortage is not caused by NVIDIA underestimating market demand or by wafer production limitations at TSMC. He mentioned that the main bottleneck for GPUs lies in packaging.
It is understood that NVIDIA's A100 and H100 GPUs are fully manufactured by TSMC using their advanced CoWoS packaging technology. However, TSMC has indicated that it will take around one and a half years to clear the backlog of packaging orders, including the completion of additional wafer fab construction and facility expansion.
Furthermore, due to severe capacity constraints in TSMC's CoWoS packaging, there have been reports in the market that NVIDIA's GPU packaging orders have overflowed to other manufacturers. According to insiders, NVIDIA is currently in talks with potential suppliers such as Samsung, considering them as secondary suppliers for 2.5D packaging of their A100 and H100 GPUs. Other candidate suppliers include Amkor Technology from the United States and Siliconware Precision Industries under the umbrella of Powertech Technology Inc.
It is worth noting that Samsung established the Advanced Packaging (AVP) division in December 2022 to compete for high-end packaging opportunities. Insiders suggest that if NVIDIA approves Samsung's 2.5D packaging process yield rate, they may allocate 10% of their AI GPU packaging orders to Samsung in the future.
According to market research firm TrendForce's investigation conducted in June this year, with strong demand for high-end AI chips and HBM, TSMC's monthly CoWoS capacity is expected to reach 12K by the end of 2023. Among them, NVIDIA's demand for CoWoS capacity, driven by AI server requirements such as A100 and H100, has increased by nearly 50% since the beginning of the year. Coupled with the growth in demand for other high-end AI chips from AMD, Google, and others, CoWoS capacity will be even tighter in the second half of the year. It is projected that with adequate equipment, advanced packaging capacity will further increase by 30-40%.