As the industry fell  9% from $597.7 billion in 2022 to $544.8 billion last year, a new growth driver emerged – AI, says  Omdia,  with NVIDIA dominating the AI chip space so comprehensively that it took the No.2 slot in the overall Halbleitermarkt.

NVIDIA  more than doubled its semiconductor Umsatz from 2022 to $49 billion in 2023. Before the pandemic, in 2029, NVIDIA’s  semiconductor Umsatz was under $10 billion.

High bandwidth memory (HBM) integrated with GPUs to facilitate AI is also seeing strong demand, with SK Hynix leading this segment and other major memory Hersteller venturing into this space.

The memory market had a down year in 2023 overall, while the HBM market had growth of 127% year-over-year in terms of 1Gb equivalent units, throughout 2023. Omdia forecasts that HBM is likely to record 2024 growth rates of  150-200%.

In 2023, the automotive segment exerted greater influence in the Halbleitermarkt as it increased its Umsatz growth to over 15% in 2023 to over $75 billion. The demand for Halbleiter in automotive accounts for approximately 14% of the entire Halbleitermarkt.

The downturn has notably affected major memory makers, traditionally among the top semiconductor companies by Umsatz. Previously, from 2017 to 2021, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology were all ranked in the top five companies by Umsatz.

However, amidst the challenging memory market conditions, Samsung Electronics is now ranked third, SK Hynix is ranked sixth, and Micron Technology is ranked twelfth in 2023.