Nvidia has agreed to give Amkor Technology a $1.5 billion prepayment to expand advanced semiconductor packaging and testing in the United States, tightening a supply relationship that already sits behind its data-centre chips.
The agreement, announced on 23 July, pushed Amkor shares up by roughly 12% in after-hours trading.
Packaging is the least glamorous stage of chipmaking and, lately, one of the most contested. It is the step where finished silicon is stitched together with memory and interconnects into the dense modules that run AI servers, and demand for that work has run well ahead of the capacity to do it.
The constraint is not abstract. Shortages of advanced packaging, rather than raw wafer fabrication, have at times been the factor limiting how many AI accelerators Nvidia can ship. That makes locking in the capacity a strategic priority rather than a procurement footnote.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!Nvidia has spent the past year turning scarce inputs into guaranteed ones. A warrant-backed deal with Corning brought new US plants and thousands of jobs into its orbit, and it recently locked in SK Hynix for HBM4 memory.
