Zero One Investment Research Daily Intelligence Brief, August 3, 2026

Google's 2028 TPU plan tops NVIDIA's current volume as TSMC packaging fills up

Top Market Signals

Google's TPU order outgrows TSMC's packaging line

Google is planning for as many as 15m tensor processing units (TPU, its own AI accelerator) in 2028, above the 13m-unit annual order scale NVIDIA (NVDA US) runs today, and TSMC (2330 TT) cannot package all of them.

Economic Daily News reports that Google asked TSMC whether it could supply that much CoWoS (chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, TSMC's advanced packaging platform) capacity in 2028. More than half of TSMC's CoWoS output for the next three years is already booked by NVIDIA, which is also co-developing the next-generation CoPoS (chip-on-panel-on-substrate) process with TSMC. Google secured over 10m units of CoWoS and is routing the remaining 2m to 3m TPU v9 units to Intel's (INTC US) EMIB-T packaging.

The design and assembly work stays in Taiwan. TSMC holds the TPU v9 2nm wafer orders, with production planned for 2028. MediaTek (2454 TT) won the TPU v9 design contract and collects the design fee whether or not Google places the wafers itself. Foxconn (2317 TT) handles TPU server design and assembly from L6 through L10 and L11, and Inventec (2356 TT) has the L10 and L11 rack design work.

The paper frames Google's build as inference capacity for its own models, with NVIDIA's platforms continuing to carry large-model training. TSMC still supplies far more advanced packaging than Intel, Samsung and the outsourced assembly and test houses combined. What is new is that the largest single buyer of 2028 packaging could not source all of it in one place.

Linked stocks: 2330 TT, 2454 TT, 2317 TT, INTC US

Sources: 經濟日報, 雲端大咖自研 AI 晶片明年放量生產 日月光、力成、京元電沾光

MediaTek drops its CoWoS backup for Intel

MediaTek (2454 TT) has stopped holding TSMC (2330 TT) CoWoS capacity in reserve for its second AI ASIC, chief financial officer David Ku said on the 31 July 2026 analyst call, because Intel's (INTC US) EMIB packaging yield has come far enough to carry the 2028 launch.

Chief executive Rick Tsai said back-end packaging is the gating step for a complex ASIC, and that MediaTek is managing substrate yield, capacity supply and cycle time with its supplier item by item. He said EMIB yield improvement and maturity are progressing well enough to meet the 2028 schedule. Ku added that switching packaging technology takes time, and that the second project's results so far leave no reason to hold a fallback.

The rest of the call put numbers around that decision. The first-generation ASIC ramps in 4Q26 and management expects it to contribute US$2bn of revenue. MediaTek lifted its 2027 served addressable market to US$80bn, counting AI accelerators only and excluding CPUs, network switches and HBM (high-bandwidth memory), and raised its share target from 10-15% to 15-20%. Tsai also said 400G and 448G SerDes IP, the high-speed links that carry data between chips, should be ready in 2H27, which supply chain sources say is what keeps MediaTek in contention for Google's following TPU generation.

The board separately approved a US$5bn flexible financing framework against more than US$7bn of cash already on the balance sheet, and Tsai confirmed it can be used to fund key suppliers' capacity expansion. Our 24 Jul 2026 Blade covered NVIDIA's US$1.5bn agreement to fund Amkor's packaging and test build-out in Arizona. The same instrument is now sitting with a fabless designer, one rung further down the chain from the platform owner.

Linked stocks: 2454 TT, INTC US, 2330 TT

Sources: 英特爾EMIB良率達標 聯發科第2代ASIC產品2028準時量產, 聯發科SerDes搶攻AI ASIC核心

Substrate yield gates the Intel packaging route

The constraint on Intel's (INTC US) bid to take AI packaging share is not the packaging step. Substrate yield is stuck near 50%, while the EMIB-T process itself is reported to run close to 90%.

Wccftech, citing an industry leaker, put EMIB-T packaging yield near 90% and its cost about 50% below TSMC's (2330 TT) CoWoS, with substrate the item holding the service back. On the record, Unimicron (3037 TT) reiterated that EMIB-T is at an early stage and that lifting capacity and yield is the immediate priority. MediaTek (2454 TT) described the same work from the customer side on 31 July, managing substrate yield with its supplier line by line.

Two Taiwanese suppliers already carry revenue on the Intel route. Powerchip (6770 TT) is the sole supplier of the silicon capacitors that sit inside the package, won through its 12-inch integrated passive device platform, and its capacity is fully spoken for. UMC (2303 TT) makes the small silicon bridges embedded in the substrate, produced at its Taiwan and Singapore 12-inch fabs.

The pricing shows how tight that layer is. Nan Ya PCB (8046 TT) reported July revenue of NT$5.44bn, up 16.13% MoM and 50.24% YoY, its highest month since January 2023. Revenue for the first seven months of 2026 reached NT$30.19bn, up 39.38% YoY. Nan Ya PCB prices ABF (Ajinomoto build-up film) substrates on the spot market, where increases have run ahead of long-term contracts. A US brokerage cited by Liberty Times expects ABF contract prices to rise 10-15% per quarter from 3Q26 and spot prices more than 20% per quarter, with the increases running into 2028.

Our 28 Jul 2026 Blade flagged Unimicron clearing NT$18.16bn of 1H26 net profit and named its 29 July call as the first chance to hear how ABF pricing and AI server allocation split across its lines. What would settle whether Intel can take meaningful share is substrate yield, not packaging yield, and that number has not moved yet.

Linked stocks: 8046 TT, 3037 TT, 6770 TT, INTC US

Sources: 台積電要小心？傳英特爾先進封裝良率直逼90％ 成本低5成, ABF載板漲價好補！南電：7月營收創3年7個月單月新高, 英特爾先進封裝進化 力積電獨供矽電容

Nine cloud buyers nearly double capital spending

TrendForce now estimates that the nine largest cloud service providers will spend more than US$886.7bn of capital in 2026, an increase of about 90% YoY, and has raised its 2026 AI server shipment growth estimate to close to 31% from 28%.

The nine are Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, ByteDance, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu. The five North American names account for close to 90% of the total, and each of them roughly doubles its own spending. TrendForce attributes the upgrade to three pulls arriving together: hyperscalers and second-tier data center operators buying more standard NVIDIA (NVDA US) GB and VR systems, new Google and AWS custom chip platforms ramping through 2H26, and Chinese operators expanding local AI deployments for large language model work.

For 2027 TrendForce models total spending of US$1.3tn, with growth slowing to close to 50%. It attributes that deceleration to the size of the 2026 base rather than to any cooling in investment.

The Taiwanese read-through runs through the server builders. Hon Hai (2317 TT), Quanta (2382 TT), Wistron (3231 TT), Wiwynn (6669 TT) and Inventec (2356 TT) assemble the systems this spending buys. TrendForce also splits the chip mix by buyer: Google leans on its own TPU across 2026 and 2027, AWS runs NVIDIA GB300 as its main GPU platform while shipping its own custom silicon steadily, and Meta uses NVIDIA GB and VR plus AMD (AMD US) Helios racks in 2026 with its own custom chip effort accelerating into 2027.

Our 24 Jul 2026 Blade flagged Alphabet lifting 2026 capex guidance toward US$205bn while saying its compute supply still fell short of demand. This dataset puts that single raise inside the industry aggregate, and shows the same doubling across all five North American buyers rather than at one of them. It is also the demand number sitting behind today's packaging and substrate signals.

Linked stocks: 2317 TT, 2382 TT, 6669 TT, NVDA US

Sources: 全球九大 CSP 廠資本支出飆 今年看增90% 鴻海、廣達等受惠

Memory shortage reaches Apple's best selling laptop

Apple (AAPL US) cannot keep the MacBook Air in stock, and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports sources describing the shortage as the worst they can remember for the product.

The evidence is in Apple's own store. Newly ordered base configurations are not shipping until late August, and some combinations of screen size, color and memory slip to early September. The machine was refreshed with the M5 chip only in March, which makes a delivery delay of roughly a month close to unprecedented for it. Mac mini and Mac Studio are in worse shape.

Apple is managing demand rather than waiting for supply. It is steering customers in stores and online toward the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro, with some marketing materials carrying the line that MacBook Air availability is subject to stock. Its back-to-school promotion, originally planned for June, was delayed by the shortage. The company is also preparing to buy memory from mainland Chinese suppliers, at least for devices sold in that market.

Pricing has already moved. Apple raised MacBook Air prices by close to 20%, and in June lifted prices across several Mac models by US$100 to US$400 per unit to absorb component costs, while doubling base storage from 256GB to 512GB. Chief executive Tim Cook warned on last week's earnings call that both leading-edge capacity and memory supply are tight.

The mechanism is displacement rather than weak demand. 9to5Mac attributes the squeeze to North American AI data center construction pulling high-bandwidth memory and high-end storage volumes, which crowds out the solid-state drive and DDR5 capacity consumer machines need. That is what makes this a supply chain signal rather than an Apple one: the Taiwanese names that fabricate and build for Apple, including TSMC (2330 TT), Quanta (2382 TT) and Hon Hai (2317 TT), see shipment timing move on a component they do not control.

Linked stocks: AAPL US, 2330 TT, 2382 TT, 2317 TT

Sources: 記憶體荒擴大 MacBook Air 鬧缺貨 牽動台鏈出貨

Memory shortage peaks in 1H27, Team Group says

Team Group (4967 TT), one of Taiwan's largest memory module brands, said the worst of the memory shortage should land in 1H27, and reported a 2Q26 result showing how much of the price move has already reached profit.

Second-quarter revenue was NT$7.59bn and net profit NT$2.41bn, taking quarterly earnings per share to NT$26.47 against a near-zero base a year earlier. First-half revenue reached NT$16.63bn with earnings per share of NT$53.44. Both the quarter and the half were records for the company. Management credited industrial and system-integration orders and a shift toward business customers alongside the DRAM and NAND flash price increases.

Citing TrendForce's late-July report, Team Group said the 2026 gap between DRAM supply and demand bits runs at -1% to -2% and widens in 2027. Expansion projects will not add wafer starts until 2H27 because of equipment move-in, construction and ramp schedules, and will not deliver bits at scale until 2028.

On pricing, the company expects DRAM contract prices to rise 20-25% in 3Q26 and 15-20% in 4Q26, with channel prices following. That splits the quality of the gain: the revenue increase here is price rather than units, and the supply answer does not arrive until 2028. Our 24 Jul 2026 Blade carried the same pattern at Transcend Information (2451 TT), whose 2Q26 net profit of NT$11.9bn exceeded its profit for any full year in its history. Two module makers clearing that bar within ten days says the increases are reaching the part of the chain with the least pricing power of its own.

What would change the read is a demand response, since each quarter of increases at this pace tests how much of the consumer and channel market keeps buying.

Linked stocks: 4967 TT, 2451 TT, 2408 TT, 2344 TT

Sources: 十銓第2季及上半年獲利同創新高 上半年每股賺逾五個股本, 十銓Q2獲利創新高 上半年每股大賺53.44元

Taiwan's panel fabs are being sold into packaging

AUO (2409 TT) and Innolux (3481 TT) are closing and selling display fabs fast enough that TrendForce expects their combined share of global LCD monitor panel supply to drop below 10% by 2028, and the buyers are Quanta (2382 TT) and ASE Technology (3711 TT).

TrendForce puts the two companies' combined LCD notebook panel supply share on a path toward roughly 20% by 2028, while LCD TV panel supply holds near 22% because that line still earns a profit. Chinese panel makers are forecast to hold 74% of LCD monitor panel supply in 2026, and LG Display continues to shift toward OLED.

Innolux plans to close Fab3, its main LCD notebook line, between late 2027 and 2028, and has not ruled out turning the site into an advanced packaging and high-value integration center. It has made progress in fan-out panel-level packaging, CPO (co-packaged optics) and through-glass-via technology. AUO sold its Hwaya plant in Taoyuan to Quanta and its C5E color filter plant in Kaohsiung to ASE, and is directing capital toward Micro LED and AI and CPO packaging.

The withdrawal moves display supply as well. TrendForce estimates that selling AUO's L7A would remove about 2.1% of global LCD TV panel supply area, and that closing L6A would take close to 5m LCD monitor panels out of the market. It expects LCD TV panel supply to run healthy to tight from 2026 through 2030 with no new lines being built. Whether AUO finds a buyer for its older notebook lines, L5C and L6A, is what decides how far this goes.

Linked stocks: 2409 TT, 3481 TT, 2382 TT, 3711 TT

Sources: 台系雙虎產能瘦身 2028年重塑 TV、監視器、筆電三大面板供需版圖

先聲 First Word: Exclusives from Chinese-Language Sources

Delta Electronics raises 2026 capex to NT$70bn

Delta Electronics (2308 TT) will spend NT$1.8bn rebuilding its first Taoyuan plant. Chairman Ping Cheng has raised 2026 capex to NT$70bn, from an original NT$65bn plan and NT$46bn in 2025, saying AI data centers are the company's largest growth driver and that customers want capacity built faster. (03 Aug 2026)
Source: 台達電擬斥資18億元重建桃園一廠

Five year memory contracts become the norm

Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron are moving memory supply from short-term negotiation to multi-year agreements built on capacity commitments, price guarantees and prepayments, with Korean media reporting Samsung's long-term contracts are intended to cover about two-thirds of its capacity. Prepayment and floor-price terms shift cycle risk from the maker to the buyer, which changes how the next downturn reaches memory earnings. (03 Aug 2026)
Source: 記憶體5年合約成新常態 預付款與底價制對抗景氣循環

TSMC's first Kumamoto fab reaches break-even

Taiwan economy minister Kung Ming-hsin said TSMC's first Kumamoto fab has reached break-even and construction of the second continues, speaking at the 2026 Taiwan Japan Semiconductor Technology Forum. Break-even at an overseas fab is the number that decides whether the Japan model gets repeated, and it arrives while the Arizona expansion is still being funded. (03 Aug 2026)
Source: 台積電熊本一廠已收支平衡 經長：台日半導體合作已是「唇齒相依」