GlobalFoundries, TSMC Sign $2B US Interposer Deal in Malta, NY

GlobalFoundries will build silicon interposers for TSMC inside its fab in Malta, New York, under a five-year, $2 billion agreement the two companies announced on October 8. Bloomberg reported that GFS shares rose about 4% in premarket trading.

Interposers are the slabs of silicon that sit beneath AI processors and high-bandwidth memory inside TSMC's Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate, or CoWoS, packages. Constraints in CoWoS capacity have been one of the gating choke points on AI-accelerator supply.

"Advanced packaging is becoming increasingly critical to delivering the performance, power efficiency and scale required for next-generation AI systems," said Ed Kaste, senior vice president of CMOS Business at GlobalFoundries.

Volume production is expected to begin ramping at Malta in the first half of 2028. The companies describe the site as the first US-based source of silicon interposers used in advanced packaging, and the agreement has an initial term of five years with a framework for future capacity expansion, per Reuters.

The work sits on top of GlobalFoundries' 65PKG interposer platform, which Crypto Briefing described as already production-qualified at TRL9, with through-silicon vias measuring 10µm by 100µm, multi-layer copper routing, and support for 2.5D and 3D heterogeneous integration.

Neither release names an end customer, breaks the $2 billion into capex versus prepaid wafers, or discloses TSMC's expected share of Malta's output. Among the 21 TSMC-related stories we've tracked over the past 90 days, including the recent VSMC Singapore fab opening, this is the first to place a core step of TSMC's packaging flow inside a US competitor's cleanroom.