Semiconductor packaging industry update: Packaging substrate shipments up 52% y-y

August 2026 confirmed production data show shipments of flip-chip ball grid array (FC-BGA) package substrates (modularized rigid substrates) rose 52% y-y. The average price per m2 also rose sharply and beat the previous record, while shipment volume on an m2 basis was lackluster y-y even though Ibiden's Ono plant came on stream; we attribute this to a further rise in the shipment weighting of high-end multilayer packages. Shipments of EMIB for commodity servers are estimated to have risen, and Taiwanese companies have been hiking FC-BGA prices, potentially prompting Japanese packaging manufacturers to revise prices for low-margin products supplied to major CPU producers. We also discuss Anthropic's ARR as a useful barometer of data center capex: assuming 5GW of data center capacity and rising ARR, with a share of revenue spent on computing resources and five-year depreciation of data center equipment, increased ARR per GW is likely to boost data center spending, and the opposite also h