AT&S is down 44% from ATH and some insiders are underwater. In an interview with Nikkei today: Demand will be on the high side for the next 24 months or more, and "we will see undercapacity within the next two years". AT&S announced plans to invest an additional 1.5 billion euros to 2 billion euros ($1.7 billion to $2.3 billion) to expand its Kulim campus in Malaysia's Kedah state, adjacent to Penang. The investment will add a second substrate production plant and a facility producing substrate cores and advanced circuit boards, supported by long-term customer commitments from AMD and another leading technology company. AT&S raised its fiscal 2026-2027 constant-currency revenue growth forecast to 45% to 55%, from 30% to 35%, following the expansion announcement. AT&S CEO, Mertin, said the semiconductor industry's technological bottleneck has shifted away from simply shrinking transistor sizes, the approach taken under Moore's Law. "The limitation nowadays is the communication speed," he said. "Who's transporting the data? We are doing [that] with the substrate." As AI chips become increasingly powerful, he said, processors must transfer enormous volumes of data between central processing units, graphics processors and high-bandwidth memory. Modern substrates have therefore evolved from acting as simple carriers for chips into performance-enhancing components that determine computing speed, energy efficiency and system performance. The growing complexity also means substrate suppliers are becoming development partners rather than conventional manufacturers. "It's not just a vendor-supplier relation anymore," Mertin said. "You have to cooperate, you have to think, you have to have a joint roadmap." That means working alongside customers from the earliest stages of chip design to jointly develop packaging architectures, refine manufacturing processes and improve production yields. Mertin dismissed suggestions that the tech industry is approaching the end of an investment supercycle, arguing instead that AI is only beginning to transform the global economy. "It's not a supercycle and then it's over," he said. "I think we are still at the beginning of a significant change."