SEMICON West kicked off in San Francisco today, 14th October, with SEMI Americas president Joe Stockunas welcoming the semiconductor industry to the event’s 2026 edition.
Stockunas highlighted the semiconductor industry reaching a trillion-dollar milestone, according to the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics Organisation, reaching this milestone much earlier than previously forecasted.
Global sales have grown fourfold from $400 billion in 2019 to a projected $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion by the end of this year. Stockunas noted that this level of growth within a seven-year period is “unprecedented” for an industry of this scale.
SEMI CEO Ajit Manocha took over the address, outlining an aggressive growth trajectory for the semiconductor market, moving from a half-trillion-dollar industry five years ago to $1 trillion today. He predicts the market will exceed $2 trillion by 2030 and potentially reach $3 trillion by 2035, driven by waves of AI, IoT, and quantum computing.
Fab expansion was also highlighted as a key growth factor, with Manocha citing 102 fabs announced to be operational by 2029, with 82 already in progress. The geographic distribution includes 78 in Asia (notably South Korea, Taiwan, China, and Japan), 15 or 16 in the Americas, and 9 in Europe.
Data centre growth also got a mention. There are currently 479 live data centre sites with 77 more in the pipeline. North America leads with 145 sites, followed by Asia with 138 and Europe with 131.
This rapid expansion is creating significant global friction and technical hurdles, however. Manocha notes that while the industry is resilient, it faces a “fractured world” characterised by energy crises, geopolitical tensions, and supply chain fragmentation.
“With this complexity and these all the challenges, many opportunities are coming because of technological inflections, smart medtech, silicon photonics, advanced packaging, compound semiconductors, quantum computing, humanoids, robotics. That’s going to become the way of life,” Manocha said.
The morning CEO summit talks also featured fireside chats with global leaders in the semiconductor industry.
Bill Frauenhofer, executive director for semiconductor investment and innovation at the US Department of Commerce, discussed the strategic expansion of the US semiconductor ecosystem through the Chips Act, trade agreements, and R&D investments.
According to Frauenhofer, the administration is leveraging $10 billion in incentives for semiconductor R&D with a focus on high-priority technological frontiers:
Quantum computing: A $2 billion investment was distributed among nine companies using a portfolio approach to cover various modalities. This included two letters of intent to IBM, Andoran, and Global Foundries.
AI compute supply chain: An $874 million investment was directed toward seven companies focusing on silicon photonics and new memory/processor architectures.
Specialised technology: Recent deals include investments in silicon carbide for geothermal drilling, free electron lasers for EUV via XLITE at Albany Nanotech, and AI-driven material science.
Another fireside chat saw Synopsys president and CEO Sassine Ghazi discuss the evolution of chip design through autonomous AI agents and the integration of multi-physics simulation.
He said: “We started from an assistant copilot to generative capability to now what we’re describing as long horizon autonomous agents, where instead of giving a prompt, you give an outcome, and you expect that model is able to reason and trigger actions for multiple agents to achieve that task. This is autonomous engineering.
“Today, there’s a massive demand for more companies to define, specialise and customise silicon. The challenge that the industry has is the shortage of human engineers. So, the whole autonomous orchestration is a very positive thing for the industry, where you still need human judgment to define the architecture, to guide, and to sign off the final check before you go into product manufacturing.”
Over 30,000 visitors are expected to walk the sold-out show floors of SEMICON West over the next few days.
