AI chip boom to drive wafer tool sales to $126B in 2026

Summary

Industry group SEMI now expects global sales of chipmaking equipment to climb about 9% to $126 billion in 2026, driven largely by insatiable demand for AI-focused logic and memory chips. The forecast sees another 7.3% increase to $135 billion in 2027 as foundries expand capacity for GPUs and high‑bandwidth memory, underscoring how infrastructure for generative AI is still in build‑out mode rather than saturation. China, Taiwan and South Korea are projected to remain the largest equipment markets, with Chinese fabs investing the most overall while Taiwan’s TSMC focuses on leading‑edge logic and Samsung and SK Hynix pour money into advanced memory for AI workloads. On the supply side, ASML, Applied Materials, KLA, Lam Research and Tokyo Electron stand out as key beneficiaries of the capex wave. The numbers reinforce that even if AI software headlines dominate, the deepest near‑term cash flows may accrue to the upstream equipment makers enabling that compute.