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AI Money: While shareholders and tech giants scramble to turn AI’s promises into real-world business opportunities, semiconductor companies are raking in billions. Samsung has emerged as the world’s top semiconductor player by revenue, and the industry is poised for another strong year.
Gartner recently reported that semiconductor industry revenue in 2024 reached $626 billion, marking an 18.1 percent increase from 2023. Preliminary projections suggest revenue will continue to grow, reaching up to $705 billion in 2025. Unsurprisingly, AI chips and custom accelerators accounted for the largest share of this remarkable market expansion.
George Brocklehurst, VP analyst at Gartner, stated that GPUs and AI processors used in data centers, servers, and accelerator cards played a pivotal role in the semiconductor industry’s growth in 2024. The rising demand for generative AI services and workloads, he confirmed, has made data center products the second-largest market segment for semiconductor manufacturers.
Revenue from data center chips surged to $112 billion in 2024, up from just $64.8 billion in 2023. Despite concerns from some industry voices about an impending downturn, the so-called “AI bubble” was instrumental in propelling Samsung to the top of the semiconductor market, with total revenue reaching $66.5 billion.
Intel slipped to second place, posting $49.1 billion in revenue with a modest 0.1 percent year-over-year increase in market share. Meanwhile, Nvidia performed “exceptionally well,” according to Gartner, with an 84 percent revenue surge to $46 billion. The GPU designer is now the world’s third-largest semiconductor vendor by revenue, as the AI boom fuels demand for accelerators and high-priced GeForce RTX cards to sustain the hype.
Gartner noted that nine of the top 10 semiconductor companies achieved record results in 2024. Korean memory manufacturer SK Hynix led the industry in growth, surging 86 percent to $42.8 billion, climbing to fourth place behind Nvidia. Memory chips have become just as crucial as GPUs, with the memory market expanding by 71.8 percent in 2024.
Memory chips now account for 25.2 percent of total annual semiconductor sales, Gartner reported. DRAM revenue grew by 75.4 percent, while NAND revenue rose 75.7 percent year-over-year. Analysts expect high-bandwidth memory to remain a key revenue driver in the DRAM market, with projected growth of 66.3 percent, reaching $19.8 billion in 2025.
