Gartner sees double-digit semi growth ahead, mainly thanks to AI

Global semiconductor revenue will grow 14 percent in 2025 to a total of 717 billion dollars, according to the latest forecast from Gartner. This year, following the 11.7 percent decline in 2023, the market is projected to grow 19 percent and reach 630 billion dollars. “The growth is driven by a continued surge in AI-related semiconductor demand and recovery in electronic production, while demand from the automotive and industrial sectors continues to be weak,” says Rajeev Rajput, senior principal analyst at Gartner.

Since 2023, GPUs have dominated the training and development of AI models. Their revenue is projected to total 51 billion dollars, an increase of 27 percent in 2025. “However, the market is now shifting to a return-on-investment phase where inference revenues need to grow to multiples of training investments,” comments George Brocklehurst, VP analyst at Gartner.

Vendors are also investing heavily in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) production and packaging to match next-generation GPU/AI accelerator memory requirements. HBM revenue is expected to increase by more than 284 percent in 2024 and 70 percent in 2025, reaching 12.3 billion dollars and 21 billion dollars, respectively.