ABF Substrates

Research evidence excerpt

ABF Substrates

Macquarie Equity Research

10 July 2026

Technology Hardware & Equipment

TaiwanABF Substrates

Stronger demand to prolong industry

undersupply Kaylin Hiroshi

Tsai Taguchi

Key Points

• We expect an ABF undersupply in 2H26-2029, with the gap widening in Daniel Jacob

2026-2028, which could lead to sustainable (or even increasing) price Kim Kim

hikes.

• Much stronger CPU demand and EMIB-T/CPO developments should Related report:

further increase substrate demand, in addition to AI GPU/ASIC growth. Advanced Packaging Overflow - EMIB expansion as a

• We believe recent corrections provide good entry points. We like catalyst for Asia supply chain

Unimicron, SEMCO, Ibiden, and double upgrade Kinsus to Outperform.

• We expect an ABF undersupply in 2H26-2029, with the gap widening

in 2026-2028: We are seeing tighter supply into 2H26 as AI demand

continues to grow, while capacity expansion is likely to be limited

except for leading players Unimicron and Ibiden. And the situation will

continue in 2027-2028 until other players can also meaningfully expand

capacity from mid-2028. However, we see new drivers, such as stronger

server CPU demand and EMIB-T/CPO development, further increasing

demand in units and area size from 2027. This should keep the industry

in undersupply until at least 2029 despite more aggressive capacity

expansion from 2028.

• Incremental demand drivers from CPU, EMIB-T and CPO: We are

seeing the trend for AI CPU (e.g., NVIDIA Vera and Amazon Graviton)

to GPU/ASIC ratio moving from 1:2-1:4 to 1:1, for better orchestration

and memory management in the agentic AI world. Intel/AMD CPUs in

AI servers also have similar trends. We expect this to largely increase

CPU demand, and thus substrates, from 2027. Intel's EMIB-T packaging