TSMC will pay $2 billion under a new agreement with GlobalFoundries to strengthen silicon interposer production in the United States, according to a report by The Register.

The deal pairs the world's largest contract chipmaker with one of its chief foundry rivals. TSMC, headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan, is tapping GlobalFoundries — which operates fabrication plants in Malta, New York, and Burlington, Vermont — to add domestic capacity for silicon interposers, the packaging components that connect logic dies and high-bandwidth memory in advanced multi-chip modules.

Why are silicon interposers a bottleneck?

Silicon interposers sit at the center of modern advanced packaging. They carry thousands of connections between processors and stacked memory, and demand for them has grown alongside the spread of AI accelerators and multi-die designs.

Most of that capacity today sits in Asia, where TSMC's CoWoS packaging family has defined the market. A US-based interposer supply chain gives TSMC an additional production footprint outside Taiwan and gives customers of American fabs a nearer source for a component that has repeatedly become a constraint.

The Register describes the arrangement as a $2 billion deal in which TSMC effectively draws on GlobalFoundries' US manufacturing to bolster interposer output.

What does the deal change?

For GlobalFoundries, the agreement brings a major customer and a new workload into facilities that have historically focused on specialized process nodes rather than leading-edge packaging. The $2 billion figure marks one of the larger sums attached to a cross-foundry cooperation of this kind.

For TSMC, the move adds interposer supply in a geography where the company is already investing heavily in fabs. It also spreads packaging capacity across more sites, an increasingly common strategy among chipmakers as packaging steps become as strategically important as transistor scaling.

Who benefits?

The arrangement covers three interested parties:

• TSMC, which gains additional US-based interposer capacity under a $2 billion commitment.
• GlobalFoundries, which secures revenue and utilization for its American plants.
• Customers building multi-chip products, who gain a broader supply base for a component prone to shortages.

The Register's report does not specify production volumes, timelines for capacity ramp, or which interposer formats the deal covers. Financial structure details — whether the $2 billion covers capacity investment, wafer purchases, or both — were also not disclosed in the report.

The deal nonetheless signals how far the interposer bottleneck has moved up the industry agenda. Two competing foundries now consider cooperative capacity building worthwhile in this segment, rather than each expanding alone.

What comes next?

Watch for announcements on ramp schedules at GlobalFoundries' US sites, qualification of the interposer supply with TSMC's packaging flows, and any customer disclosures tying the new capacity to specific product lines. Cross-foundry agreements of this scale tend to arrive with follow-on commitments from end customers in AI and high-performance computing.

The $2 billion figure, reported by The Register, stands as the headline number until either company details the deal further.