'Hardware is sexy again': Plug and Play CEO says AI boom has finally fulfilled his 2006 semiconductor dream

Amidi’s revived semiconductor vision reflects AI’s hardware renaissance driven by insatiable compute demand. Technically, advanced packaging and chiplet architectures are reshaping design-manufacturing co-optimization, with TSMC’s CoWoS bottlenecks already delaying NVIDIA and AMD shipments. Compliance-wise, U.S. CHIPS Act 'guardrails' impose geopolitical premiums on expansions in Taiwan, China, raising supply chain resilience costs by 15–20%. Intel is accelerating its IDM 2.0 push for North American localization, while Samsung bets on GAA transistors paired with HBM4 to poach TSMC’s AI clients. Over the next 18 months, a dual trend of manufacturing reshoring and technological decoupling will emerge: new fabs in Arizona, Kumamoto, and Dresden will face yield ramp delays and talent shortages, paradoxically reinforcing TSMC’s pricing power below the 3nm node.