US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is driving a fundamental reordering of the global semiconductor supply chain. According to exclusive analysis from DIGITIMES analyst Luke Lin, the administration has shifted its pressure campaign away from advanced logic chips and toward memory, delivering a blunt ultimatum to South Korea's two dominant producers: build wafer fabs in the US or face tariffs of up to 100%.

High-Bandwidth Flash (HBF) is likely to reach commercialization sooner than previously expected and could become a key technology supporting large-scale data training and real-time inference, said Joungho Kim, professor of electrical engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

As AI chip package sizes continue to grow, warpage issues in IC substrates have become more pronounced. Capacity constraints for low-CTE fiberglass cloth, a critical material used to address warpage, are forcing end customers, including Apple, Nvidia, Google, and AWS, into increasingly intense competition for supply, industry sources said.