Inside the $200 Billion Bid to Reshore Semiconductor Packaging

Semiconductor packaging — the unsung bottleneck of chip production — is suddenly the focus of a massive U.S. industrial push. Lucas and Luna trace how a single packaging bottleneck at a Malaysian factory held up NVIDIA's latest GPU for six months in 2024, and why the CHIPS Act is now pouring $200 billion into packaging plants in Arizona and Ohio. They look inside a new facility from Amkor Technology, which will use advanced 'fan-out wafer-level packaging' to shrink chips for Apple and Intel. Lucas explains why packaging now accounts for 35% of total chip cost, up from 10% a decade ago, and why even TSMC is racing to build packaging capacity in Japan and the U.S. Luna asks whether the packaging push will actually reduce reliance on Southeast Asian factories, or just create new dependencies on Japanese and Dutch lithography machines. The hosts also share a low-key reflection on why listener support — through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo — keeps this ad-free show running. #SemiconductorPackaging #ChipManufacturing #CHIPSAct #AmkorTechnology #NVIDIA #FanOutWaferLevelPackaging #TSMC #Reshoring #ArizonaManufacturing #OhioTech #SupplyChain #AdvancedPackaging #IndustrialPolicy #Economics #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #ManufacturingEconomy #LucasAndLuna Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo