ASE Technology Holding, the world’s largest chip packaging and testing provider, is raising its 2026 capital spending by $2B to roughly $10.5B, betting that demand from AI hardware keeps stretching its production lines.
The Taiwanese company, whose Siliconware Precision Industries unit packages Nvidia’s AI accelerators, previously guided capex at $8.5B. The extra money splits evenly, with $1B for facilities and $1B for equipment. ASE says it is building 13 greenfield sites this year while repurposing eight brownfield plants to absorb the workload.
Revenue from its leading-edge advanced packaging business is tracking ahead of the $3.5B target set for 2026, and CFO Joseph Tung wants to double that business in 2027. ASE argues AI is not just feeding data center demand but also lifting industrial, power, connectivity and storage chips.
The spending hike landed with a strong quarter. Second-quarter revenue climbed 27% year over year to T$191.06B ($5.88B), while net income jumped 180% to T$21.068B. Shares have more than doubled this year, up 101.6%, far outpacing the broader Taiwan market.
The expansion is another sign that advanced packaging, not just leading-edge logic, is becoming a chokepoint for AI compute. As Nvidia and others fight for CoWoS capacity at TSMC, ASE is positioning itself to catch the overflow in outsourced assembly and test.
