TrendForce posits that the wafer foundry market is expected to see a recovery in 2025, with an estimated annual growth of 20%—up from 16% in 2024. This positive outlook comes despite the weak end-market demand for consumer products, which has led component manufacturers to adopt a conservative stocking strategy and made the average capacity utilization rate of wafer foundries fall below 80% in 2024. Only advanced processes, such as 5/4/3nm nodes used for HPC products and flagship smartphones, have managed to maintain full capacity, and this situation is expected to persist into 2025. However, the visibility in the consumer end market remains low for 2025.
TrendForce's latest reports reveal that the second quarter of 2024 saw a significant increase in demand for enterprise SSDs due to the increased deployment of NVIDIA GPU platforms and rising storage needs driven by AI applications, along with a surge in demand from server brands. The surge in demand for high-capacity SSDs for AI applications—coupled with suppliers’ inability to adjust capacity in the first half of the year—resulted in a supply shortage that drove average enterprise SSD prices up by more than 25% QoQ. This price increase led to a revenue growth of over 50% for suppliers.
TrendForce reports that NAND Flash prices continued to rise in 2Q24 as server inventory adjustments neared completion and AI spurred demand for high-capacity storage products. However, high inventory levels among PC and smartphone buyers led to a 1% QoQ decline in NAND Flash bit shipments. Despite this, ASP increased by 15% and drove total revenue to US$16.796 billion, a 14.2% growth compared to the previous quarter.
TrendForce’s latest findings show that NVIDIA’s data center business is driving a remarkable surge in the company’s revenue, which more than doubled in the second quarter of its 2025 fiscal year to reach an impressive US$30 billion. This growth is largely fueled by skyrocketing demand for NVIDIA’s core Hopper GPU products. Supply chain surveys indicate that recent demand from CSP and OEM customers for the H200 GPU is on the rise, and this GPU is expected to become NVIDIA’s primary shipment driver from the third quarter of 2024 onward.
TrendForce’s latest investigations have found that the arrival of China’s 618 mid-year shopping season as well as inventory levels of consumer electronics reaching healthier levels, have prompted customers to begin restocking components, resulting in urgent orders for wafer foundries. This surge in demand has significantly improved capacity utilization rates compared to the previous quarter. Additionally, strong demand for AI servers further boosted the total revenue of the world’s top ten wafer foundries by 9.6% in 2Q24—reaching $32 billion.
