Samsung regained the highest of the leaderboard of semiconductor corporations by income, Gartner stated on Feb. 3 in its yearly worldwide semiconductor vendor statistics report. World semiconductor income hit $626 billion, up 18.1% from 2023.

“The rising demand for AI and generative AI (GenAI) workloads led knowledge facilities to grow to be the second-largest marketplace for semiconductors in 2024, behind smartphones,” stated George Brocklehurst, vp analyst at Gartner, in a press launch.

Samsung takes the highest of the semiconductor leaderboard

Samsung Electronics sat on the high of Gartner’s semiconductor leaderboard with $66.5 billion in income, rounded. The highest 5 semiconductor distributors have been:

1. Samsung ($66.5 billion in income).
2. Intel ($49.2 billion in income).
3. NVIDIA ($46 billion in income).
4. SK hynix ($42.8 billion in income).
5. Qualcomm ($32.4 billion in income).

A rebound in reminiscence machine costs helped Samsung take the highest spot from Intel. NVIDIA moved up two spots to quantity 5 as a result of its success within the AI market. Regardless of Intel’s AI PC enterprise and the Core Extremely chipset, the corporate’s semiconductor income development stayed flat at 0.1% development in 2024; Gartner stated Intel’s AI accelerator and x86 enterprise offset its successes. Gartner stated NVIDIA’s sturdy AI enterprise is the rocket engine behind its climb up the listing.

SEE: The success of Chinese language generative AI DeepSeek is divisive amongst Australian political and trade teams. 

Information facilities, CPUs, and AI processors drive the rise

“Graphics processing models (GPUs) and AI processors utilized in knowledge heart purposes (servers and accelerator playing cards) have been the important thing drivers for the chip sector in 2024,” Brocklehurst stated within the press launch.

Information heart semiconductor income alone was $112 billion in 2024, up from $64.8 billion in 2023.

Reminiscence can be sizzling, with 71.8% income development amongst reminiscence merchandise in 2024. Excessive-bandwidth reminiscence (HBM) manufacturing had a big affect, chargeable for a good portion of income for DRAM distributors; DRAM income total grew by 75.4% in 2024.

Nonmemory income, which accounts for many (74.8%) semiconductor income, grew 6.9% in 2024.

Semiconductor income predicted for 2025

As of February 2024, Gartner stated the semiconductor sector will proceed to see rising income, with $705 billion of income predicted in 2025.

“Reminiscence and AI semiconductors will drive near-term development,” Brocklehurst stated. Particularly, HBM income will improve and make up a bigger share of the full DRAM income.