King Yuan Electronics Selects Fort Worth for U.S. Fab Site, 2026 Capex Raised to NT$50 Billion
nashnova research
Taiwan's largest independent chip-testing house KYEC (京元電子) plans to spend up to $1.4 billion on a new plant in Fort Worth, Texas, after signing a prepayment deal with Nvidia — a sign that the AI-chip testing bottleneck is shifting from Asia to U.S. soil.
Why Fort Worth, not Phoenix?
Supply-chain sources say Fort Worth sits closer to the AI-server assembly and system-test supply chain than TSMC's Phoenix cluster.
This means → once chips clear testing, they ship straight to nearby contract manufacturers for system integration — cutting one cross-state leg of logistics.
The Fort Worth city council is expected to vote on a tax-incentive package in late October, the key gate for the project timeline.
How big is this investment?
The preliminary plan: at least $1 billion for the facility, plus roughly $300 million for equipment. The board-approved ceiling is $1.4 billion — KYEC's largest-ever overseas commitment.
Nvidia signed a prepayment agreement with KYEC's U.S. subsidiary AeternZ; the prepayment offsets against future testing fees. In plain terms = Nvidia fronts cash to help build the plant, then "earns it back" through test orders.
KYEC also raised its 2026 company-wide capex to NT$50 billion (~$1.56 billion), covering expansion in Taiwan, Singapore, and the U.S.
How tight is AI-chip testing demand?
CEO Sheng-Hsiung Chang says AI-chip demand has pushed order visibility out to 2027.
Construction lead times have stretched from under 12 months to at least 24 months; where one plant once met two to three years of demand, two to three plants a year are now needed.
This reflects a rapid rise in both test complexity and test time for GPUs and ASICs — application-specific chips designed for dedicated tasks — forcing capex to accelerate ahead of the curve.
Who else stands to benefit?
If Fort Worth's tax incentive clears, upstream test-interface and equipment suppliers could expand local services in Texas.
Named suppliers include MPI (旺矽科技), Chunghwa Precision Test, and Chroma ATE — six Taiwanese test-equipment makers in total.
This means → KYEC is not going to America alone; it may pull a partial migration of the testing supply chain with it.
How does Chang frame this move?
He compared the U.S. push to Taiwanese firms' 1990s wave of investment into mainland China, but called the significance fundamentally different.
In plain terms = not every company wants to go to America, and not every company can — the bar for this round of overseas expansion is far higher.
KYEC currently runs over 5,900 testers, with monthly wafer-probe capacity of roughly 350,000 wafers (12-inch equivalent) and monthly final-test capacity of about 350 million ICs, serving Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Broadcom, and Marvell.
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