TSMC's C.C. Wei: CoPoS May Reach Volume Production Within Two Years
A casually remark made by C.C. Wei at the shareholder meeting stands as the toughest challenge in this AI computing frenzy: "CoPoS will reach volume production in two years at the earliest." Without resorting to any exciting rhetoric, this leader of TSMC calmly stated the reality that while pilot lines have been established, mass production still requires time. This is precisely what is most scarce and unsettling in the current tech narrative—honesty. While the entire industry revels in the prom
Analysis
CoWoS has already elevated NVIDIA's GPUs to legendary status, becoming the entry ticket for the AI training era. CoPoS, a technology that co-packages photonic chips and electronic chips over a larger area, is seen as key to supporting next-generation ultra-large-scale AI computing—and even the convergence of optical computing. The "two to three years" timeline offered by C.C. Wei is a sober assessment from an industry giant grounded in complex engineering realities. It signals that the next physical breakthrough in computing power is not about tomorrow's keynote slide deck, but about over a thousand days of yield ramp-ups, material challenges, and supply chain restructuring. This "slowness" contrasts sharply with the "speed" expected by capital markets and the "instant revolution" hyped by tech media. TSMC is using the most straightforward methods to build the deepest moat—accumulated time and craftsmanship—this is the true trump card of a giant.
In contrast, the current public discourse is filled with impatient excitement. Look at those headlines: "Forget GPUs—Intel Unveils a Heavyweight Move to End NVIDIA’s Computing Monopoly?" and "1.6 Billion Windows Users Storm into the Agent Era Overnight." These headlines themselves are a crude simplification of the complexity of technological evolution. No matter how "heavyweight" Intel's move may be, it is still chasing a moving target—from chip design to foundry capacity, from software ecosystems to customer trust—none of which can be broken through with a single "masterstroke." And "1.6 billion users entering the Agent era overnight"? That sounds more like a marketing incantation. OS-level integration is a necessary foundation, but true agents require trustworthy permissions, mature models, and entirely new interaction paradigms—this is far from an overnight achievement. Compressing the complex democratization of technology into a dramatic "overnight" event serves no purpose beyond generating clicks and may even mislead the public’s understanding of how technology actually progresses.
By comparison, Liftoff’s IPO news is far more straightforward. $23 per share, 19 million shares—a standard business maneuver. Unlike TSMC’s declaration, which concerns the lifeblood of global AI infrastructure, or those trending headlines attempting to define the shape of the future, this is merely a capital operation by a mobile advertising tech company within an established track. This "ordinariness," amid a flood of words like "disruption," "revolution," and "termination," carries a refreshing clarity. It reminds us that besides gazing at grand narratives in the sky, countless concrete businesses on the ground are operating according to economic principles.
Volcengine’s MaaS target upgrades, the skirmishes among Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance over Skill stores, the trend of building ever-larger cars in China, the rise of "upscale casual dining" in lower-tier markets… each trending topic represents a fiercely contested battlefield. Yet beneath the heat lies technological convergence, model imitation, and traffic anxiety. When giants are all chasing the same hot topics and packaging similar narratives, true innovation often occurs in unsung laboratories, on TSMC’s pilot lines that require two or three years to "ramp up."
Our era is not short of thunderous slogans—it lacks the patience to lay a solid foundation. It is not short of promises to "storm" into a new era overnight—it lacks respect and patience for the technology ramp-up phase. While everyone fixates on GPUs and model parameters, the real bottleneck may lie in packaging, materials, and those slowly growing trees of underlying process technology. C.C. Wei’s "volume production in two years" serves as a cold shower for all impetuous mindsets: great engineering takes no shortcuts, and the accumulated momentum of technology has never been an instantaneous event on trending charts. Perhaps with fewer fantasies about "ending monopolies" and more attention to the quietly extending pilot line, we can finally see the true path to the future.
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