The mechanism: Every CHIPS Act press release and every congressional hearing on chip sovereignty still talks like fabrication is the scarce resource — more fabs, more wafer starts, more 2nm lines. It isn't. TSMC's CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate) advanced packaging lines are sold out through 2026, the single tightest link between a finished Nvidia die and a shippable AI accelerator. Commerce's own National Advanced Packaging Manufacturing Program (NAPMP) has quietly conceded the point, steering roughly $1.6 billion in competitive awards — on top of $1.4 billion already granted, with $1.1 billion of that going to Natcast's Arizona packaging pilot facility — into substrates, materials, and packaging R&D rather than more front-end fab tools. That's real federal money chasing the actual bottleneck, and it's happening well outside the fabrication headlines everyone else is trading.

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