According to Digitimes, several firms that placed orders with TSMC Arizona are now sizing up Chipzilla’s packaging shop as a quicker, smarter route to finished kit.

This has been rumoured before, but now it seems that Washington's demands for a homegrown supply chain that covers everything from semiconductor research to volume manufacturing and advanced packaging are starting to pay off for Intel.

The US has managed to drag some production onshore, but it still has pitifully few packaging options. Chipzilla sits on the widest and most advanced packaging range in the country, which DigiTimes claims has piqued the interest of Microsoft, Tesla, Qualcomm, and NVIDIA.

The report explains why Chipzilla has been scrambling to hire TSMC veteran Wei-Jen Lo. US fabless outfits are happy to tap TSMC Arizona for wafers, then send the lot to Chipzilla or Amkor for the final packaging.

In that setup, Chipzilla becomes a packaging foundry until it can build a mature external foundry ecosystem, which means a tidy short-term revenue stream for its foundry division.

Lo knows exactly what US clients expect from advanced packaging, so his arrival should help Chipzilla match the Taiwan giant’s standards. All of TSMC Arizona’s customers, including Nvidia, AMD and the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple, are potential users of Chipzilla’s packaging tools.

With packaging in Arizona rather than Taiwan, companies like Nvidia avoid the cost and time sink of shipping wafers halfway round the world. Apple and Qualcomm have already been poaching engineers with expertise in EMIB and Foveros, which shows the appetite is real.

At the moment, wafers from Arizona have to make the long trip to Taiwan for finishing, which slows the process and raises costs. If Chipzilla plugs into the local chain, customers get both semiconductor production and advanced packaging in the same state.

This is one of the ways Chipzilla and TSMC are expected to collaborate in the US, as it suits both parties. The Taiwan giant is building its own packaging plants in America, but that will take years, so it needs partners like Chipzilla and Amkor to keep US clients supplied with onshore kit.