EP37: Advanced Packaging Prepayment Signals - What a $1.5B Deal Reveals About the AI Build-out
Drew and Reese read the advanced-packaging supply chain through a single number: a roughly $1.5 billion prepayment from a major chipmaker to a contract assembler. A prepayment is not a purchase order - it is a signal with a schedule attached. The episode maps where the HBM and CoWoS constraints sit, why the equipment and test layer is the early tell, and where optical co-packaging lands next. Core frame: a customer prepayment may be becoming the standard way to finance US advanced packaging capacity, and the packaging and photonics layers are where that schedule gets real first. More from…
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