Chip market grew by over 20 percent in 2025 – thanks to AI hype

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According to market observers at Gartner, global revenue for semiconductor components grew by 21 percent in 2025 to around 793 billion US dollars. Around a quarter of this was attributable to chips used for artificial intelligence, primarily AI accelerators and RAM. Chip companies generated more than 200 billion US dollars with such components.

With the super-fast and very expensive High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for AI accelerators, the three major DRAM manufacturers Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron thus achieved around 23 percent of their total RAM revenue.

Nvidia far ahead

With phenomenal revenue growth of almost 64 percent to 125.7 billion US dollars, Nvidia is pulling even further ahead of all other chip companies. Nvidia's revenue was almost 74 percent higher than that of Samsung Electronics in second place. At the Koreans, growth was only about 10 percent. SK Hynix therefore moved closer to Samsung with 37 percent growth and displaced Intel from third place.

Because Intel has not yet been able to benefit strongly enough from the AI boom due to a lack of suitable chips, the company is falling further behind.

The ten highest-grossing chip companies worldwide in 2026
Rank		Company	Chip Revenue 2025	Market Share 2025	Growth
2025	2024		[Billion US-$]	[%]	Year-on-year comparison
1	1	Nvidia	125.70	15.8 %	63.9 %
2	2	Samsung Electronics	72.54	9.1 %	10.4 %
3	4	SK Hynix	60.64	7.6 %	37.2 %
4	3	Intel	47.88	6.0 %	-3.9 %
5	7	Micron Technology	41.49	5.2 %	50.2 %
6	6	Qualcomm	37.05	4.7 %	12.3 %
7	6	Broadcom	34.28	4.3 %	23.3 %
8	8	AMD	32.48	4.1 %	34.6 %
9	9	Apple	24.60	3.1 %	19.9 %
10	10	MediaTek	18.47	2.3 %	15.9 %
		others	298.32	37.6 %	10.3 %
		Total	793.45		21.0 %
Source: Gartner, January 2026

US company Micron, on the other hand, was even able to increase its revenue by 50 percent year-on-year, also thanks to HBM memory.

Qualcomm's revenue in fifth place grew solidly by 12 percent. However, this was significantly less growth than for those chip companies that benefit more from AI. In the fiscal year 2025, which ended in September 2025 for Qualcomm, more than 75 percent of total revenue came from chips for smartphones and licensing income. Business with chips for cars and IoT is growing significantly faster, but only accounts for a smaller portion of Qualcomm's revenue.

AI Beneficiaries

Broadcom and AMD in sixth and seventh place grew by 23 and 35 percent respectively – also thanks to AI. Broadcom helps other companies as a service provider in the development of AI accelerators; this is officially known with OpenAI. But Broadcom also develops for Google (TPU) and ByteDance, and soon likely for Anthropic as well.

At AMD, the revenue share of AI accelerators grew significantly, but the company also did very well with x86 processors.

Apple is in ninth place, with revenue in 2025 around 20 percent higher than in 2024.

MediaTek is in tenth place with almost 18.5 billion US dollars in revenue and primarily sells ARM chips for smartphones, TV sets, and also cars. But MediaTek is also likely involved as an AI development service provider.

Companies not on the list

The largest European chip manufacturer Infineon achieved revenue of 14.66 billion euros in its fiscal year 2025, which currently corresponds to around 17.1 billion US dollars; this should correspond approximately to rank 11 or 12, and Texas Instruments (TI) is also in this range.

Significantly smaller is the NAND flash specialist Sandisk, whose revenues have recently grown strongly, especially in the data center segment. Anticipating sharply rising NAND flash prices, the price of Sandisk stock has multiplied since the fall of 2025.

The pure chip contract manufacturer TSMC is not on the Gartner list because it does not sell its own chips but supplies them to Nvidia, Intel, and AMD, for example. TSMC's revenue increased by 31.6% to 3.81 trillion New Taiwan Dollars (NTD) in 2025, which currently corresponds to around 120 billion US dollars.

(ciw)