The Outlook of the Wafer Foundry Industry in 2025 Growth and Trends
TapTechNews September 19th news, industry analysis agency TrendForce today reported that driven by the continuous layout of the overall AI hardware and the improvement of the supply chain inventory in the automotive, industrial control and other fields, the output value of wafer foundries is expected to achieve a year-on-year growth of 20.2% in 2025, higher than 16.1% this year.
TrendForce expects that the performance of non-TSMC wafer foundries in this year and next year will increase by 3.2% and 11.7% year-on-year respectively, lower than that of TSMC, which also makes TSMC's share in the overall wafer foundry market increase from 59% in 2023 to 65% in 2024 and 66% in 2025.
Overall, the consumer electronics terminal market is weak this year, and upstream component manufacturers are conservatively stocking up, resulting in the average capacity utilization rate of wafer foundries being less than 80%, and only the advanced processes of 5-3nm used by HPC and mobile SoC (TapTechNews note: that is, AP, application processor) maintain full load; however, the supply chain inventory has gradually returned to the normal level since the second half of this year.
In 2025, the automotive and industrial control fields will restart sporadic stocking, the edge AI will drive the increase of the whole wafer usage, and the continuous expansion of AI cloud services. These three trends will jointly contribute to the development of the wafer foundry industry in 2025.
In terms of advanced processes, the 3nm capacity has entered the rising stage and will become the mainstream of flagship PC CPU and mobile SoC in 2025, with the largest revenue growth space; while the mid-to-mid-high-end mobile SoC, AI GPU and ASIC stay at 5-4nm, and the relevant capacity utilization rate remains at a high level; for 7-6nm, it is expected to welcome new demands in the second half of 2025 to 2026 due to the restart of the RF/WiFi chip process upgrade plan of smart phones.
In conclusion, advanced processes of 7nm and below are expected to contribute 45% of the global wafer foundry revenue in 2025.
The agency also said that as TSMC, Samsung Electronics, and Intel, the three major front-end + back-end enterprises, are actively increasing the advanced packaging capacity to deal with the strong demand for advanced packaging of AI chips, the 2.5D packaging revenue of the front-end and back-end supporting semiconductor enterprises will achieve a year-on-year growth of 120% in 2025, although the proportion in the overall revenue is still less than 5%, its importance is increasing day by day.
As for the mature processes, although the visibility of demand for consumer electronics products is low, the inventory of application components such as automobiles, industrial control, and general-purpose servers will fall back to a healthy water level in 2024, and sporadic stocking will appear again in 2025, driving the capacity utilization rate of mature processes to increase by 10% and break through the 70% mark.