2025 Predictions for the Semiconductors Space – Predict 2025

Hi, my name is Richard Gordon. I'm vice president and practice lead for Semiconductors here at FU own group. Today I'd like to talk a little bit about what's going on in the semiconductor industry, and we'll maybe have two or three predictions as well.

So first of all, let's start with the state of the industry right now at the end of 2024, and as we enter 2025, last year, the industry grew at around about 20%, and that growth was driven by a boom in data center semiconductors, particularly AI chips, and, uh, also from a boom in, in memory from the likes of Samsung, esky, Hynek, and Micron. The industry growth rate's gonna slow down a little bit and we'll probably see growth of around 10% this year. Overall, that's gonna be driven, um, I think by a pause in investment in the data center space and also a, a a, a recovery in the rest of the market as supply and demand comes more into balance.

So the industry going from strong growth last year to slightly more moderate growth in 2025. As we head towards 2030, I think we'll see another upcycle in the industry pushing the market towards a trillion dollars or so in the early 2030 timeframe. Second prediction I wanna talk a little bit about is to do with the technology roadmap over the, the, the past few decades in the industry, technology has been driven by Moore's law.

Investment in semiconductor scaling is what drove chip performance and cost reduction. However, it's increasingly challenging for companies to invest in keeping to the Moores law curve. Really only the leading foundries and leading memory players can afford to do that these days.

So we're gonna see increasing investment in advanced packaging to drive the technology roadmap. In fact, one of the equipment manufacturers reckons that by 2030, around a quarter of foundry revenue will come from the chip space. The benefit of chips is that semiconductor devices can be partitioned up into functional blocks and then recombined in advanced packaging so that there's different types of semiconductors with different properties available in a single package.

The last thing I wanna talk a little bit about is geopolitics. Of course, the industry has, is very much a globalized industry and has a globalized supply chain, but increasingly we're seeing semiconductors seen as a driver, economic growth, and also very important from a national security perspective. So what we're going to see going forward is more onshoring of semiconductor design and manufacturing.

We're gonna see increased technology transfer restrictions around the world, and also increased tariffs and trade as well. Uh, uh, that won't apply just the semiconductors, of course, that will apply to, to business more generally, but it will affect, affect the semi space. So that's a little bit of a, a look into what's going on in the industry right now.

If you wanna find out more, you can download, uh, our ebook, um, where we have some more detail on these predictions. That's futurum 2025 key issues and predictions.