Last year, shipments of silicon wafers, a key material for semiconductor manufacturing, increased from a year earlier.
According to SEMI on the 24th, global silicon wafer shipments in 2025 reached 12.973 billion in² (square inches). That was up 5.8% from the previous year.
SEMI said, "Last year was a turning point when wafer shipments returned to growth," adding, "Buoyed by the expansion of AI applications, strong demand for advanced epitaxial wafers for logic and polished wafers for High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) drove the increase in silicon shipments."
By contrast, wafer revenue during the same period was tallied at $11.4 billion (about 16.47 trillion won), down 1.2%. SEMI said the weak revenue was due to delayed recovery in demand and prices.
Ginji Yada, chair of SEMI SMG (Silicon Manufacturers Group) and executive vice president for sales and marketing at Sumco, said, "From 2025 to 2026, the wafer market is showing different trends by technology node," adding, "It is exhibiting a 'two-track' pattern of continued demand expansion and technological advancement at advanced nodes, along with a gradual rebound in the mature technology segment."
He added, "In particular, demand for 300 mm (12-inch) wafers remains solid, centered on advanced applications such as AI-based logic and HBM, and investments in data centers and Generative AI are driving demand," adding, "By contrast, in mature-node areas such as automotive, industrial, and consumer electronics, wafer and chip inventory levels are entering a normalization phase after a prolonged period of inventory adjustment."