Global semiconductor revenue is expected to reach $1.6 trillion in 2026, a 92 percent jump from $809 billion in 2025, according to a Gartner forecast published Monday that sharply raised its earlier projection of $1.3 trillion.
The revision represents a roughly $300 billion upward adjustment from Gartner’s April forecast, driven by a stronger-than-expected memory pricing cycle and accelerating AI infrastructure spending. The research firm now sees the industry posting its highest growth rate in two decades, with 2027 revenue projected to hit $1.9 trillion.
Memory Prices Fuel the Surge
Memory semiconductors are the primary engine of the upgrade. Gartner forecasts memory revenue will total $837.3 billion in 2026, nearly four times the $220.1 billion recorded in 2025. DRAM revenue is expected to surge 246.6 percent, while NAND flash revenue grows 371.9 percent. Memory’s share of total semiconductor revenue will jump from 27 percent in 2025 to 54 percent this year.
AI infrastructure has fundamentally changed the dynamics of the memory market, said Shrish Pant, Director Analyst at Gartner. While pricing expansion is accelerating growth in 2026, continued AI infrastructure deployments, higher memory content per AI server and sustained demand for high-bandwidth memory will support memory revenue growth through 2027 and beyond.
AI Data Centers to Dominate
The AI data center ecosystem is projected to account for 36.5 percent of semiconductor revenue in 2026, a share Gartner expects will exceed 53 percent by 2030. This structural shift means the traditional balance between consumer electronics, automotive and industrial chip demand is being fundamentally reshaped by hyperscaler investment.
Excluding memory, non-memory semiconductor revenue is forecast to grow 21.9 percent to $717.9 billion, then reach $864.4 billion in 2027. The non-memory segment benefits from rising demand for CPUs, networking silicon, power management chips, optical interconnects and analog devices that large AI clusters require.
The semiconductor industry is entering a fundamentally new phase of growth. The pace of industry expansion is accelerating dramatically, driven by sustained investment in AI infrastructure and a stronger-than-anticipated memory pricing cycle, said Ben Lee, Director Analyst at Gartner.
The forecast arrives on the same day that Hot Chips 2026 opens at Stanford University, where NVIDIA, AMD and Intel are presenting their next-generation GPU architectures. NVIDIA will detail its Rubin platform with 336 billion transistors on TSMC 3nm, AMD will present the Instinct MI400 series, and Intel will debut Crescent Island, a GPU designed specifically for agentic AI inference.
Gartner’s outlook reinforces the scale of AI’s impact on the chip industry. With memory alone on track to surpass $1 trillion by 2027, the demand surge is pushing manufacturers to expand capacity while driving up costs across the entire technology supply chain.
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