Nvidia will switch Blackwell chips to improved CoWoS-L packaging – this promises difficulties for the company and partners

For the second year in a row, visiting China and Taiwan on the eve of the Chinese Lunar New Year, Nvidia founder and longtime CEO Jensen Huang explained that CoWoS-L packaging technology will be in demand for the production of advanced Blackwell family of computing accelerators, and from aging CoWoS -S company will gradually move away. Perhaps such a migration will create certain difficulties in the work of both Nvidia itself and its partners.

Image source: NVIDIA

As Reuters notes, the head of Nvidia made the following clarifications: “As we move to Blackwell, we will mainly use CoWoS-L. Of course, we are still producing Hopper, which will use CoWoS-S. We will also be converting CoWoS-S related capacity to CoWoS-L.” In fact, the main advantage of CoWoS-L is the ability to combine multiple chips on a single substrate with a special high-speed interface, and this arrangement is very popular in the computing accelerator segment. In other words, as Huang added, we are not talking about reducing the volume of chip packaging in general, but about the transition from CoWoS-S to CoWoS-L.

In any case, as the head of Nvidia admitted, the company and its partners now have four times more chip packaging capacity available to them than a couple of years ago. According to prominent industry analysts, Nvidia recently revised its future production plans, prioritizing the use of CoWoS-L packaging, which is used in combination with multi-chip packaging. Accordingly, single-chip versions of the Blackwell family of accelerators were discontinued, and now all efforts are devoted to increasing the production volumes of multi-chip versions that require CoWoS-L packaging. TSMC will not suffer as much in this context, but some suppliers of both companies will be in a difficult position due to the urgent restructuring of supply chains and production.