Data‑centre chip forecast

A new market forecast says data-center chips could become a nearly $688 billion business by 2032, up from about $283 billion in 2026. (marketsandmarkets.com) The projection comes from MarketsandMarkets, which said the market would expand at a 15.9% compound annual growth rate between 2026 and 2032. Communications Today reported the forecast on April 7, 2026. (marketsandmarkets.com) (communicationstoday.co.in) In plain terms, these are the processors, memory chips, networking parts and power-management chips that run the warehouses of computers behind cloud services and artificial-intelligence systems. MarketsandMarkets said processors, memory, network chips, sensors, power-management and analog chips are all part of the category. (marketsandmarkets.com) The forecast ties the growth to hyperscale cloud companies building more workload-specific chips, which are custom semiconductors tuned for one job instead of many. MarketsandMarkets said that shift is aimed at raising performance efficiency and lowering total cost of ownership. (marketsandmarkets.com) That demand is already showing up in adjacent markets. Dell’Oro Group said on March 12, 2026 that the data-center information-technology components market kept growing in the fourth quarter of 2025 on large-scale artificial-intelligence deployments and demand from both AI and general-purpose systems. (delloro.com) Memory is one of the clearest pressure points. In Micron’s fiscal first-quarter 2026 earnings call on December 17, 2025, executives said the company’s high-bandwidth memory volume for calendar 2026 was sold out and pricing negotiations for that year were complete. (fool.com) Power and cooling are rising with the chips. Nvidia said cooling can account for up to 40% of a data center’s electricity use, and said liquid cooling is becoming central for rack-scale Blackwell systems built for large artificial-intelligence workloads. (blogs.nvidia.com) The electricity backdrop is getting tighter too. The International Energy Agency said in its April 2026 assessment that data-center electricity demand worldwide is set to more than double to 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, roughly equal to Japan’s current total power consumption. (spglobal.com) (iea.org) Forecasts like this are not bookings, and market-research estimates can move if cloud spending, chip supply or artificial-intelligence demand changes. But the direction matches what chipmakers, infrastructure vendors and power planners are already reporting in 2026. (marketsandmarkets.com) (delloro.com) (iea.org)