LG Group is making a strategic bet that its decades of display glass expertise can open a new high-margin business in semiconductor packaging, with LG Innotek establishing dedicated operations for glass substrates and glass interposers targeting AI accelerators and high-performance computing chips.
The initiative positions LG alongside Korean rivals SK Hynix and Samsung in what industry analysts describe as a “glass value-chain race,” a scramble to secure materials, processing capabilities, and substrate capacity before mass adoption of glass-based chip packaging later this decade.
LG Innotek, the LG Group subsidiary closely linked to LG Display, has upgraded its glass substrate working group to an independent division, signaling a strategic commitment rather than exploratory R&D. The company has built a pilot production line in Korea to validate mass-production feasibility for glass substrates, initially targeting high-end Flip Chip BGA and other advanced packages.
The technical rationale centers on properties that make glass superior to organic substrates for large, complex chip packages. Glass offers significantly higher stiffness, with Young’s modulus around 70–80 versus approximately 20 for organic materials, which sharply reduces warpage in large-area packages. Glass also matches silicon’s coefficient of thermal expansion more closely, improving reliability and alignment through thermal cycling. Fine, high-aspect-ratio vias can be drilled more precisely in glass, enabling denser wiring between chiplets and lower electrical loss at high frequencies.
For AI accelerators and large chiplet-based processors, these properties enable larger packages with many chiplets, higher I/O density, cleaner high-speed signaling, and better thermal behavior at extreme power levels.
The move represents a logical extension of capabilities the Korean display ecosystem has developed over decades. Ultra-thin, large-panel glass processing for OLED and LCD manufacturing requires precision handling, surface quality control, and thermal management expertise that translates to semiconductor glass substrates and interposers.
LG Display’s 2025 partnership with Nippon Electric Glass on next-generation ultra-thin OLED glass substrates illustrates how display glass R&D is already pushing toward thinner, flatter, more precise glass, specifications technologically adjacent to advanced packaging requirements. While LG Display itself remains focused on OLED panels for IT, television, automotive, and gaming applications, industry coverage treats the company’s glass and panel processing capability as a potential manufacturing backbone once glass panel-level substrates and interposers reach volume production.
South Korea’s display-device glass substrate market exceeded $10–12 billion in 2025, with forecasts projecting high-single to low-double-digit compound annual growth driven by OLED, IT, and automotive displays. Government policy explicitly supports advanced glass substrates for both displays and semiconductors, with R&D incentives and domestic production support tightening links between display glass suppliers and emerging semiconductor glass demand.
LG’s glass initiative unfolds within intense Korean competition to control the full glass substrate value chain before large-scale AI demand materializes. SK Hynix, through its Absolics subsidiary, already operates the first commercial glass substrate fab in Georgia, shipping to customers including AMD and Amazon for AI and high-performance computing silicon.
Samsung Electro-Mechanics is pursuing a joint venture with Sumitomo Chemical for glass core materials, while Samsung Electronics has invested in domestic glass specialist JWMT to secure supply and know-how from materials through substrate processing.
LG’s differentiated approach extends its existing substrate and packaging business through Innotek while leveraging partners like UTI, a precision glass-processing specialist supplying reinforced cover glass to major smartphone OEMs. The recently announced R&D partnership combines UTI’s thin, durable glass with LG’s substrate expertise. LG Innotek’s CTO group has designated glass substrate and glass interposer development as flagship programs alongside chip-embedding substrates.
Glass substrates are not expected to replace organic substrates broadly in the near term. Analysts position glass as a high-margin, high-performance niche initially focused on ultra-high-end AI and data center parts, with broader adoption closer to 2030 as costs decline and the ecosystem matures.
SK’s Absolics began commercial shipments in 2024–2025. TSMC and others plan panel-level glass packaging, including chip-on-panel-on-substrate architectures using 310mm square glass panels, with shipments targeted around 2028. LG Innotek’s pilot line focuses on glass core substrate processes, with stated plans to move into FC-BGA products once reliability and manufacturability targets are met.
A future AI accelerator configuration might place compute dies, HBM memory, and networking chiplets on a large glass interposer with ultra-dense wiring and potentially integrated silicon photonics, with LG Innotek providing the glass interposer panel and LG Display contributing panel-level manufacturing expertise.
For Korean display ecosystem participants, including panel makers, glass suppliers like Corning Korea and Nippon Electric Glass, domestic glass processors, and equipment vendors, the glass interposer opportunity offers a path to smooth earnings cyclicality from TV and IT panel markets by selling high-margin glass into AI and HPC packaging.
Korean panel makers Samsung Display and LG Display already exited large LCD production and shifted to OLED, which uses less display glass per area than LCD. Current glass price volatility affects Chinese LCD makers more directly than Korean firms. The glass interposer push is less about changing today’s panel capacity or pricing dynamics than about diversifying the broader LG Group into semiconductor packaging where display-adjacent expertise creates competitive advantage.
Over time, capital expenditure and engineering talent inside Korean display firms may tilt increasingly toward glass-related materials and substrates businesses, including for chips, even as panel fabs themselves stay focused on OLED and premium display formats.
