Record equipment spend in 2025
Global semiconductor-equipment spending reached $135.1 billion in 2025, a 15% increase from 2024 driven by investments in advanced logic, memory and AI capacity. That surge signals continued high demand for manufacturing tools and service capacity across the supply chain. (digitimes.com)
Chipmakers and their suppliers spent a record $135.1 billion on manufacturing equipment in 2025, the highest annual total the industry has logged. (semi.org) SEMI said the total was up 15% from $117.1 billion in 2024, with spending pushed by advanced logic, memory and new capacity tied to artificial intelligence chips. (semi.org) Semiconductor equipment is the machinery used to build chips: wafer-processing tools shape circuits onto silicon, test systems check whether chips work, and packaging tools connect finished chips into usable products. In 2025, wafer-processing equipment sales rose 12%, while other front-end segments increased 13%. (semi.org) The sharpest gains came after the wafer leaves the factory line. Test equipment billings jumped 55% year over year, and assembly and packaging equipment sales rose 21% as artificial intelligence devices and high-bandwidth memory required more checks and more advanced packaging. (semi.org) That pattern tracks how artificial intelligence hardware is being built now. Faster processors increasingly depend on high-bandwidth memory, which stacks memory chips closely together, and on advanced packaging, which links multiple chip parts in one package instead of relying on a single large die. (semi.org) Most of the buying stayed in Asia. China remained the largest market at $49.3 billion in 2025, down 0.5% from 2024, while Taiwan rose 90% to a record $31.5 billion and South Korea increased 26% to $25.8 billion. (semi.org) China, Taiwan and South Korea together accounted for 79% of global semiconductor-equipment purchases in 2025, up from 74% a year earlier. Taiwan passed South Korea for the No. 2 spot for the first time in three years, according to the industry data collected by SEMI and the Semiconductor Equipment Association of Japan. (semi.org; (seaj.or.jp) The regional split shows where the new factories are being tooled for the next chip cycle. China kept spending heavily on mature-node and some advanced capacity, while Taiwan and South Korea accelerated purchases for artificial intelligence processors and memory used in data centers. (semi.org) SEMI also said in a separate forecast on April 7, 2026 that worldwide 300-millimeter fab equipment spending is expected to rise another 18% to $133 billion in 2026 and 14% to $151 billion in 2027. For toolmakers, the 2025 record looks less like a one-off spike than the base for another expansion year. (semiconductorpackagingnews.com)
