Omdia: AI chips drive ~50% revenue

A semiconductor is a tiny switch etched into silicon, and the industry usually grows by selling billions of cheap chips into phones, cars, and gadgets. Omdia says that pattern has shifted toward a small number of expensive artificial intelligence parts. (omdia.tech.informa.com) (businesswire.com) On April 23, Omdia raised its 2026 semiconductor revenue growth forecast to 62.7%. It said demand for data-center servers, DRAM, and NAND memory is rising so fast that shortages are likely to last well into 2027. (omdia.tech.informa.com) The key point is not unit volume. Omdia said computing and data storage revenue is set to rise 90% year over year in 2026 to more than $700 billion, driven by higher memory prices and AI server demand. (omdia.tech.informa.com) Memory is now central to the story because AI servers need stacks of very fast memory sitting close to the processor. Omdia said DRAM revenue climbed from just over $50 billion at the 2023 low to above $150 billion in 2025, helped by high-bandwidth memory and server DDR5. (omdia.tech.informa.com) Packaging is the step that turns separate dies into one working module, more like assembling an engine than printing a chip. CNBC reported on April 8 that Nvidia had reserved the majority of TSMC’s most advanced packaging capacity, and TSMC said its CoWoS packaging is growing at an 80% compound annual rate. (cnbc.com) That helps explain why TSMC sits in the middle of this cycle. TSMC reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $35.90 billion, gross margin of 66.2%, and second-quarter revenue guidance of $39.0 billion to $40.2 billion as AI demand kept lifting its high-performance computing business. (investor.tsmc.com) SK hynix is benefiting on the memory side. The company said on January 28 that 2025 revenue reached 97.1467 trillion won and that HBM revenue more than doubled year over year, helping deliver its highest annual results on record. (news.skhynix.com) ASML sits further upstream, selling the lithography tools chipmakers use to print leading-edge circuits. In its 2025 annual report, ASML said sales rose 15.6% and that AI demand drove strong logic and high-bandwidth-memory investment among customers. (asml.com) Omdia’s broader market numbers show how concentrated the gains have become. The firm said the total semiconductor market grew about 53% from 2023 to 2025, while revenue among the top ten chip companies rose 90%, and four companies increased their share of industry revenue from 24% to 42%. (omdia.tech.informa.com) The result is an industry selling fewer of the parts that used to define chip cycles and more of the parts that build AI clusters. In Omdia’s telling, the bottleneck is no longer just making chips; it is memory, packaging, and the capital needed to keep all three expanding at once. (omdia.tech.informa.com)