On June 2nd, the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics Organization (WSTS), jointly established by leading semiconductor companies worldwide, released its latest spring industry forecast report. Driven by the explosive demand for the entire artificial intelligence industry chain and the significantly faster than expected pace of global data center construction, the organization once again raised its industry growth forecast significantly. It is expected that the global semiconductor market will soar 89.9% year-on-year in 2026, with the total market size reaching $1.511 trillion, setting a record for the highest annual growth rate in the industry's history; Looking ahead to 2027, the industry's prosperity will continue, with an expected annual growth rate of 26.6%, and the market volume will further climb to 1.914 trillion US dollars.
Compared to WSTS' first round forecast in December last year, the upward adjustment in this forecast is extremely significant: previously, institutions only estimated a year-on-year growth of 26.3% in the industry in 2026, with an overall scale of 975.4 billion US dollars. With AI servers, HBM high bandwidth storage, and general-purpose computing chip orders continuing to be fully booked in the first half of 2026, the progress of data center implementation around the world far exceeded previous estimates, becoming the core incentive for the significant upward adjustment in this forecast. From the perspective of industry cycle, this round of semiconductor upward cycle has broken away from the previous consumer electronics driven logic and officially entered a super upward channel dominated by artificial intelligence computing infrastructure.
Breaking down by product category, storage chips have become the first core engine driving the industry's surge. According to the report, the global storage chip market is expected to grow at a year-on-year rate of 249.5% in 2026, with a total market size of over 800 billion US dollars for the year. The volume of individual products will directly exceed the total global semiconductor industry market in 2025. HBM high-end storage, DRAM, and NAND flash memory will be supported by AI big model training and cloud computing power cluster procurement, and supply and demand will continue to be tightly balanced. Product prices and shipments will rise synchronously. Logic chips closely follow and maintain steady high growth, with an expected year-on-year growth of 37.3% for the whole year. The market size is expected to reach 410 billion US dollars, and AI acceleration chips, advanced process general-purpose processors, and automotive logic chips are the main growth drivers of the sector. In addition, sub categories such as analog chips, power devices, and sensing chips rely on vehicle electronics and industrial intelligence upgrades to achieve robust expansion, forming a resonance upward pattern for all categories.
On a regional level, WSTS stated in its report that the semiconductor markets in all major regions of the world will maintain positive growth throughout 2027, with the Americas and Asia Pacific regions tied as the dual core of industry growth. Among them, the Americas rely on the huge computing power and capital expenditures of North American cloud vendors to drive chip procurement demand, while the Asia Pacific region, with its well-established wafer manufacturing and packaging and testing OEM industry chain cluster advantages, undertakes the landing of the vast majority of global chip production capacity, and the two regions continue to lead global industrial growth; The European, Middle Eastern, and Southeast Asian markets have steadily expanded under the driving force of new energy and automotive electronics, becoming incremental supplements to the industry.
Industry analysts say that the industrialization of AI is moving from top-level research and development to large-scale commercial implementation. Global technology companies continue to increase their investment in computing infrastructure, and the supply and demand gap for storage and high-end logic chips is difficult to bridge in the short term. The global semiconductor high prosperity cycle from 2026 to 2027 has sufficient certainty, and the upstream and downstream wafer fabs, equipment materials, and packaging and testing links in the industry chain will continue to benefit deeply from this round of industry dividends.
