Industry Insights

Industry research reports cited in the coverage put global computing capacity at 4,495 EFlops as of June 2025, up 117% year on year, with intelligent computing accounting for 85% of the total — marking a structural shift from general to intelligent computing.

The global AI compute market is approaching US$1.2 trillion in 2026; the AI semiconductor market is estimated at about US$485 billion this year, on track for roughly US$753 billion by 2030, while global semiconductor spending hit US$793 billion in 2025, up 21%.

Capital is flooding in: global data center capex rose 57% in 2025 and is expected to exceed US$1 trillion in 2026, driven by more than 10 million high-end accelerators, with AI infrastructure spending already surpassing US$1.3 trillion.

China's computing capacity reached 962 EFlops — about 21% of the global total, up 73% year on year — and domestic AI accelerator shipments keep climbing: Nvidia holds about 55% of China's AI card market (2.2 million units), domestic vendors a combined 41% (1.65 million), and AMD and others about 4% of a roughly 4-million-unit total.

GlobalFoundries announced on October 8 a multi-year manufacturing agreement with TSMC: GF will expand silicon interposer capacity at its Malta, New York fab to supply TSMC's CoWoS advanced-packaging ecosystem, in a deal worth an estimated US$2 billion over an initial five-year term, with volume ramp expected in the first half of 2028.

The deal makes GF the first US-based supplier of silicon interposers for advanced packaging, adding a clear supply-chain regionalization dimension to what is otherwise a pure capacity play.

Counterpoint Research estimates TSMC's CoWoS supply-demand gap at about 20% in 2026, narrowing to roughly 10% in 2027 as internal capacity expands toward 185,000 wafers per month; TrendForce expects TSMC's 2026 average monthly CoWoS capacity at 120,000–140,000 wafers — a record — with 2027 capacity up more than 60%.

Yole Group data cited in the coverage puts the global advanced-packaging market at about US$44.3 billion in 2022, growing to roughly US$78.6 billion by 2028 at a compound annual rate of around 10%, with AI demand as the core driver.

The mystery "Party A" in Synaptics' October 8 proxy filing is Cirrus Logic, which made an unsolicited rival bid in September after onsemi's approach, Bloomberg reported citing people familiar with the matter.

onsemi revised its proposal on October 1 to an all-cash transaction worth about US$5.7 billion (US$123 per share), replacing its original all-stock offer valued at roughly US$7 billion.

Nomura expects China's wafer-fab equipment market to grow at a compound rate of about 19% from FY2025 to FY2030, lifting China's chip self-sufficiency from roughly 34% in FY2025 to about 47% in FY2030.

Upstream wafer suppliers are moving first: Shin-Etsu Chemical, SUMCO and GlobalWafers have all announced two rounds of price increases for 2026.

AMD's space-grade Versal AI Core XQRVC1902 is now sampling with early customers and is aimed at MIL-PRF-38535 Class Y, the highest reliability certification for space electronics.

The lidless organic package is designed for missions lasting up to 15 years and is fully pin-compatible with the existing VC1902 device family.