SILICON ISLAND: When asked about geopolitical tensions, Lisa Su said that ‘Taiwan is absolutely critical to the semiconductor supply chain, and very, very critical for AMD’
By Lisa Wang / Staff reporter
Advanced Micro Devices Inc （AMD） CEO Lisa Su （蘇姿丰） yesterday said the company plans to “substantially” increase manufacturing capacity next year through its Taiwanese supply chain, particularly with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co （TSMC, 台積電）, as surging demand for artificial intelligence （AI）-related processors continues to outstrip supply.
“It is a very exciting time right now for all kinds of compute, and especially on the CPU [central processing unit] side,” Su said during a visit to Taiwan. “The overall market has increased a lot in 2026, and so we have also increased our own supply and capacity in 2026, but I can say that the demand is even higher than our supply, so we continue to ramp up supply.”
Su’s trip was aimed at securing more capacity from AMD’s local supply chain partners — including TSMC, backend providers and substrate suppliers — to expand overall supply.
“We have been able to increase our supply as we have gone through 2026, and we’re going to substantially increase our supply in 2027,” Su said. “But we can definitely use more, and so that’s one of the reasons that I’m here is to make sure that our entire supply chain ramps up their capability on CPUs, GPUs [graphics processing units], and all of the AI demand.”
AMD used to plan for one or two years ahead, but now it must look to three, four or five years into the future to ensure “all of the capacity comes up at the same time,” Su said.
“TSMC has worked with all of us, and we are very close partners. There’s very, very high demand for the next several years. We can see very high demand, and so we need more advanced wafer capacity,” she said.
TSMC’s US facility in Arizona has done extremely well for AMD, and the company looks forward to more capacity worldwide to meet high demand, she added.
Asked if Powertech Technology Inc’s （力成科技） fan-out panel-level packaging could serve as an alternative to TSMC’s supply-constrained chip-on-wafer-on-substrate （CoWoS） technology, Su said that “CoWoS and advanced packaging are absolutely critical for our high-performance computing [portfolio] moving forward.”
“We’re always looking at packaging innovation across the supply chain and how we bring more capacity on board,” she added.
Chip packaging service provider Powertech in July said that it would start shipping AI chips utilizing its advanced PLP technology for AMD in the second half of next year.
Asked about AMD’s contingency plans for possible supply disruptions due to the Taiwan Strait tensions, Su said that “Taiwan is absolutely critical to the semiconductor supply chain, and very, very critical for AMD.”
AMD encourages all partners to have geographic diversity, she said.
As demand for AMD’s chips continues rising, the company would invest more in Taiwan’s supply chain partners, Su said.
In May, AMD made a US$10 billion investment commitment to ensure the availability of advanced packaging technology capacity over the next three years.
The company’s local elevated fan-out bridge ecosystem partners include Powertech and chip testing and packaging service providers ASE Technology Holding Co （日月光投控） and its subsidiary, Siliconware Precision Industries Co （矽品精密）.
Substrate suppliers Unimicron Technology Corp （欣興電子）, Nan Ya Printed Circuit Board Corp （南亞電路板） and Kinsus Interconnect Technology Corp （景碩） are also part of the ecosystem.
Su visited TSMC, Acer Inc （宏碁）, Asustek Computer Inc （華碩）, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co （鴻海精密） and Quanta Computer Inc （廣達） yesterday.
新聞來源：
TAIPEI TIMES