Two years ago, Intel() made a high-profile announcement: Glass Core Substrate (GCS) would become the core of next-generation advanced packaging, and the company planned to invest more than $1 billion to drive its industrialization.
Today, the technology has entered the final qualification stage, but genuine commercial products have yet to appear. As Samsung, SKC, TSMC(), and Japanese materials companies successively announce mass-production plans, competition in glass substrates has shifted from “who first proposed the concept” to “who can deliver first.”
Based on currently available public information, 2027–2030 will be the critical window for the commercialization of glass substrates. This is not merely a materials upgrade; it also determines whether ultra-large Chiplet systems, HBM, and co-packaged optics (CPO) in the AI era can continue to scale package size.
Why is the industry betting on glass?
Glass is not intended to replace silicon. It is intended to replace the organic substrates widely used in today’s advanced packaging.
Over the past decade, GPUs, CPUs, and HBM have increasingly adopted Chiplet architectures, and package area has expanded rapidly. Take NVIDIA as an example: the Blackwell package measures about 2,739 mm², while the next-generation Rubin Ultra is expected to reach 7,470 mm²—almost equivalent to a combination of silicon and HBM spanning nine reticle fields. Package sizes this large are already approaching the physical limits of organic substrates.
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