A recent report from Taiwan suggests that a major power shift is underway in the AI chip supply chain.
The report claims that Alchip, a design partner for Amazon Web Services (AWS), has reserved a massive 60,000 wafers per month of TSMC's advanced packaging capacity, known as CoWoS, for Amazon's new Trainium3 AI accelerator. This technology is the critical bottleneck in producing high-performance AI chips, as it's needed to connect powerful GPUs with high-bandwidth memory (HBM).
However, the 60,000 wafers per month figure deserves a closer look. Industry estimates place TSMC's total CoWoS capacity for 2026 between 90,000 and 130,000 wafers per month. If the report were literally true, AWS alone would be consuming roughly half of the world's entire supply, which seems unlikely given Nvidia's dominant market position. A more plausible interpretation is that this number represents a cumulative or annualized booking for all of 2026, averaging out to about 5,000 wafers per month.
Even so, the strategic intent is clear, and this move didn't happen in a vacuum. First, Amazon recently announced a staggering $200 billion capital expenditure plan for 2026, primarily for AWS, signaling its commitment to building out its own AI infrastructure. Second, TSMC has consistently stated that its advanced packaging is completely 'sold out,' creating a sense of urgency for customers to lock in capacity far in advance. Third, the competitive pressure is mounting, with Microsoft also developing its own Maia AI chips that compete for the same limited CoWoS resources.
Ultimately, this is about more than just numbers; it's a strategic battle for supply-chain control. Hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft are leveraging their immense financial power to develop custom silicon, aiming to reduce their dependency on Nvidia and control their own technological destiny. Securing a reliable supply of advanced packaging is the most critical step in this process. While the exact figures in the report may be up for debate, the direction is unmistakable: the race to secure CoWoS capacity will be a defining factor in the AI hardware landscape of 2026.
- CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate): An advanced semiconductor packaging technology by TSMC. It stacks multiple chips on a single base, enabling high-speed connections, which is essential for high-performance AI accelerators.
- Hyperscaler: A term for very large-scale cloud computing companies like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud that dominate the cloud infrastructure market.
- WPM (Wafers Per Month): A standard industry metric for measuring the production capacity of a semiconductor fabrication plant or a specific process.