The land on the outskirts of Longtan, a district in Taoyuan in northern Taiwan, spent three years as a symbol of what happens when a government refuses to accept a chipmaker’s “no.” Now it is being pulled back into service. On August 9, Taiwanese media reported that TSMC is formally advancing the third-phase expansion of the Longtan Science Park, planning two to three fabrication plants for its next-generation 1.4nm process alongside two advanced packaging facilities running CoWoS. Supply-chain sources cited by Liberty Times said the company’s global capacity for both 1.4nm logic and CoWoS packaging has been fully reserved by customers.
The decision closes a loop that began badly. When the government first proposed the Phase 3 expansion in late 2022, local landowners rebelled: about 88 percent of the targeted land was in private hands, and a self-help group accused the authorities of steamrolling the community. Protests continued through 2023, and in October of that year TSMC said it was “no longer considering” the site, shelving what had been its most anticipated domestic announcement and pivoting investment to Tainan and Kaohsiung, where its 2nm line now ramps at Fab 22.
What changed was persistence. The Hsinchu Science Park Bureau, which oversees the site, held two rounds of public hearings in late 2025 and early 2026. Village chief Ye Laiwang publicly reversed his position, citing the jobs and schools a major technology cluster would bring. With opposition softening, the bureau submitted the expansion proposal to the National Science and Technology Council in May, which approved it, and the plan moved to the Executive Yuan in June for further review. The revised development covers about 104 hectares and, according to the latest reports, land for the first two 1.4nm fabs and a panel-level advanced packaging plant is secured, with pilot production possible in the second half of 2027.
The 1.4nm node, known internally as A14, is TSMC’s most ambitious process generation. It uses second-generation nanosheet transistors with gate-all-around architecture, combined with the company’s NanoFlex Pro design system, which lets chip designers vary transistor channel width continuously rather than in discrete steps. TSMC says A14 delivers a 10 to 15 percent speed gain at equivalent power, or a 25 to 30 percent power reduction at equivalent speed, against the 2nm node ramping this year, along with roughly a 1.23 times improvement in logic density. Volume production is scheduled to begin at the Central Taiwan Science Park in Taichung in mid-2028, with Apple expected to be the first major customer, using the process for the A22 Pro chip in its 2028 iPhone lineup.
The packaging half of the plan is just as consequential. CoWoS, TSMC’s chip-on-wafer-on-substrate technology, is the binding constraint for AI accelerators: Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom design chips that must be assembled through it, and the company has told suppliers its capacity is sold out. Longtan is not new to this work. The campus already hosts TSMC’s Advanced Packaging Fab 3, which runs InFO lines dedicated to high-end Apple processors. Adding a CoWoS hub there would make Longtan the only greenfield site in the company’s expansion program where leading-edge logic and advanced packaging are under construction at the same time.
TSMC has been scrambling to add packaging capacity across its network. The company is expanding its Advanced Backend facilities in Taiwan and has outsourced part of its substrate assembly work to outside suppliers such as Siliconware Precision Industries to relieve pressure. Customers have pre-paid and pre-booked to secure allocation, and executives have said CoWoS demand is running ahead of supply through 2027. A Longtan hub, close to the company’s northern Taiwan engineering base, would let TSMC pair packaging lines with the logic fabs that feed them, cutting the logistics and yield risks that come with shipping wafers between campuses.
The financial scale is significant. Analysts have estimated the sub-2nm investment program at roughly $49 billion, and TSMC has separately committed more than $65 billion to its Arizona campus, with additional fabs in Kumamoto, Japan, and Dresden, Germany. None of those international sites is designed to build A14-generation logic and operate CoWoS packaging in parallel, which is why Taiwan’s original manufacturing corridor retains a strategic role even as the company globalizes.
Hurdles remain. The Executive Yuan review is outstanding, the environmental impact assessment has not cleared, and land acquisition from private owners will not be completed until 2029 at the earliest, according to people familiar with the planning. Analysts caution that timelines of this kind slip, and that pilot production in the second half of 2027 depends on approvals moving quickly.
For the industry, the revival matters beyond one district. It signals that the bottleneck for AI chips has moved from chip design to every stage of manufacturing, from leading-edge lithography to the packaging that stitches chips together. TSMC’s customers, having pre-booked both 1.4nm and CoWoS capacity, are effectively betting that the company can run two of the most constrained processes in the world at one site. The residents of Longtan, after years of resistance, appear to have reached the same conclusion as the government: the factory is coming, and the question is no longer whether, but when.
