Analyst: the semiconductor landscape is being redrawn

Claus Aasholm of Semiconductor Business Intelligence has issued a warning that the semiconductor industry won’t see the highly anticipated upturn by 2026. On the contrary, “the 2026 supercycle won’t be up, it will be down,” he said during a presentation at the Evertiq Expo in Malmö last month. The upcoming bust is primarily the result of a continued build-up of manufacturing capacity across all nodes, even when demand remains lackluster. “All the numbers show that it’s very doubtful that we need this capacity,” Aasholm commented, adding a disclaimer that he’s a data analyst, not a forecaster.

According to Aasholm, the semiconductor industry is currently undergoing a fundamental transformation that’s breaking the traditional 4-year cadence of up- and downswings. Starting around 2020, geopolitics, China’s quest for autonomy and the rise of AI have started to reshape supply chains, fragmenting the semiconductor cycle into micro-cycles, some of which may never again experience the significant upswings that were once taken for granted after a downturn. “This tide doesn’t lift all boats,” Aasholm warned.