Abstract:
The latest data from market research organization Omdia shows that the global semiconductor industry revenue reached US$425 billion in the second quarter of 2026, setting a new historical record. Driven by the continued explosion in demand for enterprise-level artificial intelligence hardware, revenue increased by 31.4% quarter-on-quarter. This growth rate far exceeded the long-term rules of the industry and broke the norm of market performance for decades.
Statistics show that the cumulative revenue of the global semiconductor industry in the first half of 2026 has reached US$752 billion. Omdia predicts that industry revenue is expected to exceed US$500 billion in the third quarter, pushing total annual revenue to more than US$1.25 trillion. If this forecast is realized, the global semiconductor market will be approximately 50% larger than that of 2025.
Judging from historical data, since the first quarter of 2002, the industry has experienced a total of 97 quarters, of which quarter-on-quarter growth of more than 10% has only occurred 10 times. This means that four consecutive quarters of double-digit growth starting from the third quarter of 2025 is an extremely rare phenomenon in history.
The core driving force for this round of growth comes from the boom in artificial intelligence infrastructure construction. As enterprises continue to increase investment in AI systems, the demand for high-performance computing hardware has increased significantly, especially the demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Because such products for data centers and enterprise customers are more profitable, wafer manufacturers and chip manufacturers are prioritizing more production capacity for related products rather than traditional consumer hardware.
Among various products, memory chips became the largest contributor to market growth this quarter. Omdia pointed out that memory integrated circuit revenue accounts for more than half of the world's total semiconductor revenue. Major memory chip products such as DRAM, NAND and NOR all achieved their best performance in history in the second quarter and continued their strong growth momentum.
In addition to storage products, non-storage semiconductors also performed well. This part of the market grew by 10% quarter-on-quarter, significantly higher than the historical average seasonal growth rate of approximately 3%. At the same time, microprocessor market revenue grew by 16%, much higher than the usual average growth level of about 1%, showing that AI-related computing demand is driving the expansion of the industry chain.
Looking forward, the industry generally expects that semiconductor product prices will remain high this year. This trend will not only affect the pace of enterprises purchasing hardware equipment, but will also put continuous pressure on data center expansion and construction budgets. For enterprise IT managers and hardware procurement departments, the problem of tight memory supply and high costs is expected to continue to affect infrastructure update and expansion plans in the second half of 2026 and even 2027.
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