The Chip Insider®–SEMI ISS 2026

SEMI ISS: is the first major conference of the year where all the most senior sales and marketing execs are in one room. Being there is the best way to take the industry’s temperature for the coming year because all of them have had a week back in the office, know well what’s happening in their company, and now need to quiz their peers about what they found out. All you have to do is watch and listen. This year the temperature was hot. Certainly hotter than the Half Moon Bay weather outside, which was itself a rare level of warm. Back in the days when ISS was held in Spanish Bay, the outside weather was generally a better forecaster of the year ahead than the forecasters inside ̶̶̶̶ ̶̶̶̶ especially when it was stormy outside. The correlation was above 80%. But this has never been the case for Half Moon Bay, for which the weather is invariably cold, wet, and frigid for some of the best years of the industry.

The presentations and panels were mostly a repeat of the AI-AI-AI party-hard craziness that has dominated the semiconductor scene since the 2023 slowdown. While most have tried to forget, the silver-haired worried if the next big dip was around the corner, late in 2026 or 2027. They wondered if anything like the AI boom had happened before. Having been in the industry since 1978, I could sadly tell them, yes it had. There was the 1975 crash that came after a video game boom and 4K DRAM crash. Then there was the 1985 PC crash and 64K DRAM crash where the industry built 5 times as many DRAM fabs as it needed, with most of them coming on line that year. Then there was the Internet crash of 2001, where everything was overbuilt. Overfunded tech bubbles eventually pop. With all due respect to Marvel Comics’ ‘Fantastic Four,’ all the silver silicon surfers know how to navigate with the crashing waves of a chip cycle.

Fantastic Forecasts: Ajit Manocha of SEMI was the first to say 2026 would be the year the semiconductor industry hit the 1 Trillion dollar mark. TechInsights and IDC agree with this, while IBS and Yole said it would fall far short in 2026. Mark Patel, McKinsey, now sees $1.6T by 2030. Mike Howard, TechInsights, sees a memory market that’s greater than $400B this year…

“The present is the new future …
that where you sit, you create everything that’s going to come”
— Sarah Jones