Semiconductor equipment orders are the earliest thermometer for AI compute expansion. SEMI's latest forecast raises 2026 global semiconductor equipment sales to $165.9 billion, up 23.2% year over year, with a mid-term target of $229.5 billion by 2028, signaling that capex for advanced nodes and memory capacity is still accelerating.
AI Compute and Memory Drive Equipment Spending
SEMI's view rests on two pillars. First, AI training and inference keep pushing logic-chip capacity onto advanced nodes, where large AI accelerators depend on the most leading-edge process. Second, memory — especially HBM and high-stack 3D NAND — is the most direct pull on deposition, etch, and lithography tools, and the forecast's emphasis on "sharp memory equipment expansion" maps to the global HBM shortage. Meanwhile AMD's Q3 revenue surged 45% year over year to a record $16.3 billion and it expects data center to exceed 80% of total revenue by 2027, validating real capex strength on the compute side from the earnings front.
Domestic Equipment Vendors Ride the AI Capex Wave
China's 300mm wafer-fab equipment spending keeps double-digit growth through 2026-2027, and that capex flows into core consumables such as sputtering targets. For domestic equipment and materials vendors, fab expansion pace plus higher per-wafer consumable usage jointly build order visibility. Yet localization remains partial, and the gap with global leaders persists, so order realization must be tracked quarter by quarter.
Two things worth watching: whether SEMI's mid-term outlook is revised higher again, and how fast domestic equipment enters advanced-packaging and HBM-related process steps.