According to the latest forecast from technological research and consulting firm Gartner, global semiconductor revenue has been projected to grow 14% in 2025 to total $717 billion (£552bn~).

Following an earlier decline in 2023, semiconductor revenue is rebounding—and expected to see double-digit growth in both 2024 and 2025. By the end of this year, the market is forecast to grow 19% and reach $630bn (£485bn~).

“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,” explained Rajeev Rajput, a senior principal analyst at Gartner.

What Will Help to Boost Semiconductor Revenue?
The research firm has anticipated that, in the near term, the memory market and graphics processing units (GPUs) will strengthen semiconductor revenue globally.

The worldwide memory revenue market is forecast to record 20.5% growth in 2025, to total $196.3bn (£151bn~). Interestingly, sustained undersupply in 2024 is set to fuel NAND memory prices up 60% in 2024, but they are poised to decline by 3% in 2025. With lower supply and a softer pricing landscape in 2025, NAND flash revenue is forecast to total $75.5bn (£58bn~) in 2025, up 12% from 2024.

Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) supply and demand is also set to rebound due to improved undersupply, unprecedented high-bandwidth memory (HBM) production and rising demand, and the increase in double data rate 5 (DDR5) prices. Overall, DRAM revenue is expected to total $115.6 bn (£88bn~) in 2025, up from $90.1bn (£69bn~) in 2024.

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AI’s Impact on Semiconductors
Since 2023, GPUs have commanded the training and development of AI models. Their revenue is projected to total $51bn (£39bn~), an increase of 27%, in 2025.

George Brocklehurt, a VP analyst at the research firm, noted that “However, the market is now shifting to a return on investment (ROI) phase where inference revenues need to grow to multiples of training investments.”

Among them is a steep increase in HBM demand, a high-performance AI server memory solution. “Vendors are investing significantly in HBM production and packaging to match next-generation GPU/AI accelerator memory requirements,” said Brocklehurst.

HBM revenue is expected to increase by more than 284% in 2024 and 70% in 2025, reaching $12.3bn (£9.4bn~) and $21bn (£16bn~) respectively. Gartner analysts predict that, by 2026, more than 40% of HBM chips will facilitate AI inference workloads, compared to fewer than 30% today. This is largely due to increased inference deployments and limited repurpose for training GPUs.