The motherboard market is so bad that flagship boards are selling at entry-level prices
To that end, SMIC, China's premier chipmaker, has posted a record $3 billion quarter and expects to hike wafer prices to contend with insatiable regional demand. Keep in mind, these successes come not from GPUs but other parts like logic ICs, BCD power management devices, and optical transceiver components.
H200 AI GPUs finally reach China under case-by-case import licenses, but it's already too late for Nvidia
SMIC posts record $3B quarter and hikes wafer prices — US sanctions hand Chinese foundry a captive AI market
Speaking of optical components, which are one of the hottest commodities in the chipmaking industry, the market is set to explode, estimated to reach an eye-watering $144.4 billion by 2030. Driving those figures, according to China Insights Consultancy, is a hunger for co-packaged optics, photonics chips, transceiver modules, and new techniques, as copper traces and cables begin to reach their natural bandwidth limits.
AI data center optical interconnect market to hit $144 billion by 2030, an over ten-fold increase from 2024 figures, according to new projections
This week, LG reportedly entered the chip packaging business, shipping a Laser Direct Imaging (LDI) tool, a maskless machine especially designed for patterning interconnects. This marks LG's first foray into the advanced packaging arena. The LDI machine trades resolution for pure throughput, which is incredibly welcome. While the LDI machine has reportedly been shipped to an OSAT, it remains new to the arena, and it'll likely take the South Korean company years to firmly establish itself as a reliable toolmaker.
LG enters chip packaging arena with Laser Direct Imaging machine, as TSMC's CoWoS remains constrained
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With that, we'll see you next week for a bumper Hot Chips edition of this digest. I've seen the schedules and anticipate some incredibly insightful pieces coming out of the show. For now, if you'd like to read any of the articles above and to gain access to Bench , you'll need to purchase a subscription. Your support goes a long way in helping us to publish deeper, more insightful stories that might otherwise fall outside of our regular areas of coverage.
Sayem Ahmed is the Subscription Editor at Tom's Hardware. He covers a broad range of deep dives into hardware, both new and old, including the CPUs,\u00a0GPUs, and everything else that uses a semiconductor. He has worked as a professional tech journalist since 2015 and has written for Gamespot, IGN, and Dexerto. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-25/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Sayem Ahmed Social Links Navigation Subscription Editor Sayem Ahmed is the Subscription Editor at Tom's Hardware. He covers a broad range of deep dives into hardware, both new and old, including the CPUs, GPUs, and everything else that uses a semiconductor. He has worked as a professional tech journalist since 2015 and has written for Gamespot, IGN, and Dexerto.
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