AMKR

A chip arrives from TSMC in Taiwan as a thin disc of silicon with millions of transistors etched into it. On its own, this piece of silicon cannot connect to a motherboard, cannot handle heat, and would break if you touched it. Before it becomes the processor inside an AI server, it has to be packaged.

This is what Amkor does. They place the silicon die on a small circuit board called a substrate, connect it to the outside world through thousands of microscopic copper bumps, and — for the most advanced AI processors — sit it alongside six to twelve high-bandwidth memory stacks on a shared silicon interposer, all connected at picosecond timing. This is "advanced packaging," and it is the single most technically demanding step in making a modern AI chip.

Amkor runs this work across Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines, with smaller operations in Portugal, China, and the US. Korea is the center of advanced packaging — where their high-density fan-out (HDFO) programs for AI data center processors are being qualified and ramped. Vietnam reached profitability in Q4 2025 and is absorbing system-in-package work migrated from Korea, freeing Korea for more HDFO and test growth. In October 2025, Amkor broke ground on an Arizona campus — a $7 billion project with Phase 1 construction completing in mid-2027. This is the only commercial-scale advanced packaging facility being built in the US, supported by roughly $2.85 billion in CHIPS Act incentives.

Full year 2025 revenue was $6.7 billion. At roughly $50–150 of packaging value per advanced AI chip, that represents hundreds of millions of sophisticated assembly operations — each precise to the micron.