Chip sales hit a record 791.7 billion dollars in 2025
Bell Labs licensed the transistor for just 25,000 dollars after its 1948 invention. By 2025 global chip sales had reached a record 791.7 billion dollars, up 25.6 percent in a year on the back of demand for artificial intelligence hardware, and the industry was forecast to approach a trillion dollars in 2026.
William Shockley, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen built the first transistor, and cheap licensing let companies such as Motorola, Texas Instruments and Fairchild start producing them. In 1958 Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild separately worked out how to put many transistors on a single chip. That integrated circuit set off decades of exponential growth in device output, the pattern known as Moore's law.
Until the 1980s chipmakers did nearly everything themselves: designing, purifying chemicals and silicon wafers, building furnaces and lithography tools, then assembling and testing the finished parts. LSI began a different model in 1969 as a fabless firm that only designed chips and paid others to make them. By the mid-1980s Taiwan's TSMC and UMC had emerged as foundries that manufacture solely for other companies, and that split between design houses and fabrication plants now shapes most of the industry.
Advanced plants are ferociously expensive. TSMC's 3 nanometre factory, finished in 2020, cost 19.5 billion dollars, and as of 2021 only TSMC, South Korea's Samsung and America's Intel could make the most advanced chips. Intel was then limited to 10 nanometres while its two rivals worked at 5, and GlobalFoundries stopped at 12 because each smaller node costs so much more to develop. Firms from the Netherlands, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and the United States dominate the business.
Growth is strong but bumpy, averaging around 13 percent a year over two decades with sharp swings. In 2025 logic chips were the biggest category at 301.9 billion dollars, followed by memory at 223.1 billion. Sales rose fastest in Asia Pacific while Japan's fell.
Source: Semiconductor industry
