GlobalFoundries and TSMC have signed a five-year manufacturing agreement worth $2 billion under which GlobalFoundries will produce silicon interposers for TSMC's CoWoS advanced packaging technology in the United States, Tom's Hardware reports.

The deal directly addresses the component that has become the tightest bottleneck in AI accelerator production. CoWoS — chip-on-wafer-on-substrate — relies on silicon interposers to connect large logic dies to high-bandwidth memory stacks, and interposer supply has constrained output of AI chips for major customers.

What does the agreement cover?

Under the terms disclosed, GlobalFoundries takes on production of the silicon interposer layer used in TSMC's CoWoS flow, with manufacturing located at GlobalFoundries facilities in the US. The arrangement runs for five years and carries a total value of $2 billion.

The structure pairs the two companies in a way rarely seen between leading-edge competitors and trailing-edge foundries:

• TSMC supplies the CoWoS process integration and customer relationships.
• GlobalFoundries contributes US-based wafer capacity and interposer manufacturing capability.
• Output feeds TSMC's packaging operations serving AI and high-performance computing customers.

Why interposers?

The interposer is the passive silicon layer that carries thousands of connections between a processor die and the surrounding HBM stacks in a CoWoS package. It does not require leading-edge transistor nodes, which makes it a plausible product for a foundry such as GlobalFoundries, whose process portfolio centers on mature and specialty nodes rather than the bleeding edge.

For TSMC, the agreement adds interposer volume without consuming capacity inside its own wafer fabs, which have struggled to keep pace with CoWoS demand since AI accelerator orders surged.

What does it change for US chip supply?

The agreement places a meaningful slice of advanced packaging's supply chain inside the United States. CoWoS production has historically concentrated in Taiwan, and interposer manufacturing on American soil gives TSMC's customers a partially domesticated path from wafer to package.

For GlobalFoundries, the $2 billion contract represents one of its largest publicly disclosed manufacturing agreements and anchors additional utilization at its US sites. It also positions the company inside the AI hardware supply chain without competing directly for leading-edge logic fabrication.

What comes next?

Execution timelines, volume targets and the specific GlobalFoundries site or sites involved were not disclosed in the initial announcement. The companies have not detailed when the first interposers from the arrangement will enter TSMC's CoWoS output.

Industry attention will focus on how quickly the added interposer capacity translates into additional packaged AI accelerator supply, and whether the GlobalFoundries-TSMC model becomes a template for further cross-foundry manufacturing agreements in advanced packaging.