According to the latest data from Omdia's "Semiconductor Application Market Forecast Tool (AMFT) - China Region, Q2 2026" report, the Chinese semiconductor market is projected to achieve a year-on-year growth rate of 92.9% in 2026, reaching a market size of $812.08 billion. This represents a significant upward revision of $265.6 billion, or a 48.6% increase, compared to the forecast in the "AMFT Shipments: China - Q4 2025 Update" version, which anticipated a 31.26% growth to $546.5 billion.

With the widespread adoption and massive growth driven by artificial intelligence becoming a global consensus, China, as one of the nations at the forefront of AI development, is poised for extensive infrastructure buildout around AI in 2026. The Computing & Data Storage category is forecast to grow by 126%, accounting for 62.9% of the total application market. In comparison, the global semiconductor market is expected to surpass $16 trillion overall in 2026, with computing and storage comprising 60.7% of the total. This indicates that China's semiconductor industry development is aligning with global trends, fully entering an AI-driven technological era.

In absolute market size terms, the Wireless Communications category is expected to grow by 68.8%. However, this industry, dominated by smartphones, faces an extreme market environment characterized by sharply rising supply costs and accelerating shipment contraction. Against the backdrop of persistent supply-demand imbalances for memory chips, prices for smartphone memory continue to climb. While terminal manufacturers are raising prices to maintain profit margins, this comes at the expense of shipment volumes. This application category's share of the overall market is projected to decline from 30.43% in 2025 to 26.63% in 2026, with a further drop anticipated in 2027.

Omdia's latest Q2 2026 data shows that the Chinese semiconductor memory market is expected to see a dramatically revised growth rate of 262.9% in 2026, reaching $449.6 billion. According to the Omdia report "Semiconductor Application Market Forecast Tool (AMFT) - China Region, Q2 2026" (by chip category), the scale of China's memory chip market will hit $449.6 billion in 2026, with its market share increasing from 29.4% in 2025 to 55.4% in 2026. It is expected to maintain a majority market share going forward. In contrast, the global semiconductor memory chip market is projected to reach $886.4 billion in 2026, accounting for 54.8% of the total global semiconductor market.

The primary driver for the increased demand in semiconductor components is the infrastructure construction spurred by AI. AI cloud training, inference, and the imminent large-scale growth of edge and endpoint-side inference are significantly boosting requirements for memory specifications and capacity, further intensifying the tight supply-demand situation for memory.

AI is also driving growth in other chip categories: logic chips are forecast to grow by 27.9%, and analog ICs by 25.4%, particularly concentrated in high-end computing chips and high-specification server-related power chips. Microcontroller growth is also expected to reach 15%, primarily fueled by new application scenarios enabled by endpoint AI, especially physical AI.

AI's Role in Boosting Domestic Semiconductor Self-Sufficiency

2026 is being termed the breakout year for AI inference. Chinese domestic AI computing chip suppliers can leverage their deep understanding of specific scenarios to provide more comprehensive hardware solutions across various edge and endpoint tiers. Particularly with the opportunity presented by "chip-model co-design," domestic AI models are expected to become increasingly tightly coupled with local Chinese computing platforms in terms of product definition and ecosystem co-creation.

The comprehensive proliferation of AI provides a significant boost to China's current semiconductor industrial foundation. This is especially true for mature semiconductor process nodes and the gradual capacity expansion in power devices, which are providing increasingly sufficient production capacity for domestic chips. The infrastructure demand generated by AI is set to substantially increase the utilization rate of domestic chips. The gradually releasing capacity from the upstream supply chain will also benefit, bringing in more orders and improving capacity utilization rates.