Amkor Technology has confirmed it will build a $2 billion advanced packaging and test facility on a 104-acre site in Peoria, Arizona, with construction beginning imminently and production expected in early 2028. The revised plan, approved by the Peoria City Council on August 29, swaps out Amkor’s originally designated plot in nearby Vistancia for a significantly larger parcel in the city’s Innovation Core.
Why the switch? Because the stakes have changed. Amkor’s facility is arguably the most ambitious U.S.-sited outsourced semiconductor packaging operation ever announced, and the clearest signal yet that the back end of the supply chain is finally catching up to America’s fab frenzy.
Even as companies like TSMC and Intel are set to bring cutting-edge wafer production to U.S. soil, the final assembly, test, and packaging stages — where silicon dies are turned into functional high-performance processors — remain dominated by facilities in Taiwan and South Korea.
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That bottleneck has become painfully clear as AI chips like Nvidia’s H100 previously hit capacity ceilings due to limited packaging throughput. Amkor wants to change that, and it’s betting the Silicon Desert is the place to do it.
Advanced packaging, meet Arizona heat
The post-Moore’s Law era has shifted performance gains from raw transistor counts to how well those transistors are connected. That’s where advanced packaging wins, and where the U.S. has fallen behind.
Amkor’s new plant will specifically support high-performance packaging platforms, including TSMC’s CoWoS and InFO. These technologies are behind Nvidia’s data center GPUs and Apple’s latest silicon. TSMC has already signed a memorandum of understanding to offload packaging from its nearby Phoenix fabs to Amkor’s facility, cutting the weeks-long turnaround time for wafers currently shipped back to Asia.
Apple, for its part, is reportedly locked in as the first and largest customer. Backed by $407 million in CHIPS Act funding and access to federal tax credits, Amkor’s expansion is part public policy, part corporate necessity, and 100% designed to keep the U.S. relevant in a chips industry increasingly defined by multi-die complexity.
Far from a quick fix
Still, the 2028 start date means the pain isn’t over. Any hope of short-term relief for GPU shortages or AI server bottlenecks will remain tied to Asia’s mature packaging lines. And while the land deal is done, Amkor now faces a steeper climb: overcoming the talent crisis.
With a projected 70,000–90,000-worker shortfall across all planned U.S. fabs, even high automation won’t save Amkor from the brutal math of a limited talent pool.
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