President Lai Ching-te attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the Baipu Industrial Park in Kaohsiung on September 21, saying it would fill an important gap in southern Taiwan's semiconductor ecosystem.

The park covers about 89 hectares. Authorities expect it to generate annual output of NT$300 billion, roughly US$9.445 billion, and to create more than 4,000 jobs.

The project is a collaboration of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Kaohsiung City Government and TSMC, centered on advanced packaging, with the aim of concentrating post-fabrication stages in the south.

Between Front End and Back End

Front-end wafer fabrication and back-end dicing and packaging were long treated as separate worlds. As scaling approaches physical limits, advanced packaging that binds multiple dies into one package has become a central means of raising performance.

The stacked high-bandwidth memory used in AI accelerators belongs to this domain. The back end is no longer an ancillary stage but part of the design.

Taiwan's semiconductor clusters have been concentrated in Hsinchu and Taichung. Placing an advanced packaging base in the south also spreads the burden of workforce, land and power supply.

Read Alongside

On the same day it was reported that Microsoft plans to double its data centers in Taiwan. The side that makes the chips and the side that runs computation on them are expanding simultaneously on one island.

Power and water remain the shared constraint. Taiwan's state utility continues to hold rates while forecasting a loss this year, so how large industrial demand is to be met will stay under discussion.