MediaTek hires TSMC packaging veteran as it targets AI chip market

MediaTek has hired former TSMC executive Douglas Yu as a part-time adviser, signaling that the real bottleneck in the AI hardware race is no longer just chip design, but the advanced packaging needed to turn leading-edge silicon into usable accelerator systems.

The move comes as CoWoS, or Chip on Wafer on Substrate, has become one of the most valuable technologies in semiconductors. Widely used in AI chips, including Nvidia’s, the packaging process has been under intense strain as cloud providers and chip buyers scramble for limited production slots. In an AI market where demand for accelerators keeps climbing, access to packaging capacity has become a strategic advantage that can shape who ships first, who scales fastest and who captures pricing power.

Yu brings deep experience to that contest. He joined TSMC in 1994 and retired in 2025 after decades in backend research and development, including work that helped develop CoWoS. Industry reporting has placed him among TSMC’s six top R&D leaders, the group known inside the company as the six knights, a label that reflects how central his expertise was to the foundry’s packaging push. For MediaTek, hiring an engineer with that background is a direct bet on know-how that is scarce, hard to replace and increasingly tied to AI execution rather than mobile chips alone.

MediaTek said it wants Yu’s experience to guide roadmap planning, research and development, and investment strategy for future advanced packaging technologies and related products. That matters because the company is trying to move beyond its long-standing strength in mobile semiconductors and win a larger role in data-center AI silicon. Last week, MediaTek said it expected to generate multiple billions of dollars in revenue from AI accelerator ASIC chips by 2027, a target that puts the company squarely in the market for custom AI hardware rather than niche experimentation.

The hire also underscores Taiwan’s widening influence in the AI supply chain beyond transistor design. TSMC’s packaging capacity has already emerged as a bottleneck for AI chip production, and bringing in one of its most experienced packaging figures suggests MediaTek sees the next phase of competition as a struggle over integration, manufacturing leverage and access to the technology that binds AI chips together.