Alignment Beats Attraction

One of the most common strategies regions pursue is this: land a major investor — and let the rest fall into place.

It feels efficient. It looks bold. It creates headlines.

And for a while, it works.

But in semiconductors — and especially in backend operations like Assembly, Test, and Packaging (ATP) — this approach hits a wall.

Unlike aerospace, where Sonora's ecosystem gradually aligned after initial anchor investments, the semiconductor value chain moves faster, demands more, and depends on deeper integration across actors who don’t always speak the same language: universities, government, suppliers, infrastructure developers, regulators, and industry itself.

The hardest part of building regional capacity isn’t funding or even talent.
It’s alignment.

And that’s exactly what Pillar 1: Coordination is designed to address.

Not Just One Player — One System

Sonora can’t bet on a single OSAT arriving and magically triggering an ecosystem reaction.

To become a true hub for backend investment, the region needs shared frameworks, cross-sector coordination, and mutual accountability — now, not later.

Why?

Because none of the other pillars work in isolation:

• Talent needs universities aligning with each other — and with U.S. standards — so skills are transferable, microcredentials stack, and students can move across institutions without friction. That’s coordination.

• Positioning depends on telling a credible story — one that matches what OSATs find on the ground. That requires alignment between marketing, readiness, and reality.

• Suppliers don’t integrate themselves. They need visibility into ATP requirements and cross-institutional support to qualify and scale.

• Infrastructure must match actual use cases — not generic industrial templates.

• Policy is only effective when it reduces risk — and risk is reduced when everyone’s pulling in the same direction.

• Programs like the Ecosystem Accelerator are only as strong as the willingness of actors to sit down together and build.

In short: every pillar requires coordination.

Pillar 1 doesn’t sit on top of the others. It runs through them.

Coordination as a Competitive Advantage

What does real coordination look like?

It’s not a task force. It’s not a ribbon cutting.

It’s a process — slow, iterative, sometimes messy — that turns parallel efforts into shared momentum. It’s building the kind of cross-sector trust that lets a government agency back an experimental supplier pilot, or a university adapt its curricula based on feedback from a visiting OSAT team.

It’s also a first-mover advantage that can’t be bought or copied.

Because even if another region gets more funding or interest later, it won’t matter if its actors are still working in silos.

There are things time unlocks that money can’t.

So What Happens Now?

Sonora is already doing the hard work of building together.

he goal isn’t perfection — it’s convergence.

When the strategy is shared, the programs aligned, and the actors show up not as representatives but as co-builders, a new kind of momentum starts to form.

And that’s what makes a region investable.

Not noise. Not logos. Not luck. Coordination.