At present, as the semiconductor factories such as NVIDIA provide powerful processors for AI applications, the semiconductor and AI have started to develop simultaneously, and the semiconductor equipment manufacturers are also welcome the rapid growth.According to Gartner's data, the semiconductor equipment market in 2016 Sales rose 11% to $ 37.4bn while Gartner also predicted that semiconductor device market sales in 2017 will grow 26% to $ 46.6bn.
In addition, Gartner estimates that global semiconductor capital expenditures will reach 69.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2017 and 75.8 billion U.S. dollars in 2020, and TSMC, UMC, GlobalFoundriew and SMIC will be the largest purchasers of semiconductor devices, among which TSMC Will account for one third of the other chip makers such as Samsung Electronics, Micron, Intel, Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics (ST) have their own fabs, but in the future will continue to add new equipment.
As a result, companies such as semiconductor equipment application materials, Lam Research, ASML, Tokyo Electron and KLA-Tencor will benefit from this trend.
However, it is worth noting that there are still analysts who hold a conservative attitude.Morgan Stanley's Joseph Moore believes that there is no doubt that AI will bring the semiconductor equipment industry growth, but still not enough to change the business cycle Moore pointed out that new technologies always contribute to growth, such as the smart phone and cloud computing over the past seven years, but the semiconductor device market until almost no improvement until 2017, the future growth momentum brought by AI may be other needs The decline of the part of the offset, so the overall industry will not be turning point due to AI and the material CEO Dickerson have different views on this, he believes that AI will be another factor in reducing the semiconductor equipment industry fluctuations in the PC era, Equipment spending is often dominated by PC demand, but the boom-and-bust cycle has begun to change since 2010, when smartphones and other mobile devices create additional demand for semiconductors and equipment plants. Now that AI, cloud computing and IoT are gradually lowering equipment Industrial volatility.
The current AI development is still in its early stages, the future can drive the demand for semiconductor devices remains to be seen.