Artificial intelligence (AI) drives special application chips (ASICs), including semiconductor chip design, silicon intelligence, cloud service suppliers and other major factories, and has an aggressive layout of ASIC chips for AI, which has strong demand for Taiwan's advanced chip processing. Taiwan's factory has also accelerated its combined growth of ASICs, and market estimates that ASIC will promote AI chip growth in 2026.
Artificial intelligence applications are booming, and demand for processors (CPUs), picture processors (GPUs), and special application chips (ASICs) has increased significantly. Research and development agency Counterpoint Research estimates that global semiconductor industry revenue will exceed US$1 trillion in 2030, nearly doubling its growth in 2024, mainly benefiting from agent artificial intelligence (Agentic AI) and Physical AI application drivers.
Among them, ASIC is a chip designed for custom design for specific purposes. It can be used in areas such as cryptocurrency mining, artificial intelligence computing, and signal processing. It is tailor-made and has extremely high chip efficiency.
Professional personnel analyzed that AI applications such as cloud computing, big language training model (LLM), edge computing (edge AI) accelerate the development of GPU and ASIC chips.
In addition to NVIDIA and Ultramicro (AMD) actively launching AI chips, Broadcom, Marvell, Shixin-KY, Creative, Joint Technology, Intel, Qualcomm, Silicon-KY and other chip designs and silicon intelligence (IP) manufacturers are also actively deploying ASIC chips for AI.
NVIDIA has also launched the NVLink Fusion technology platform to open up the interconnection of customized chips and enter the ASIC market, including Joint Development Corporation, Miweier, Shixin-KY, Astera Labs, Synopsys Technology and Cadence, and has continuously adopted NVLink Fusion.
In addition to chip manufacturers, cloud service providers (CSPs) are also investing in the development of ASIC chips. According to external legal entity analysis, customized AI chips include Google TPU, Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer and fully automatic driver FSD, Amazon's Trainium series of Cloud Computing Services (AWS), Microsoft's Athena, Meta's MTIA architecture, etc.
The chip design manufacturer also cooperated with CSP giant to develop ASIC chips for AI applications. The investor pointed out that Broadcom cooperates with Google, Meta, word jumps, etc.; the cooperation targets of Miweier include AWS, Microsoft, Meta, etc.; Shixin-KY mainly cooperates closely with AWS, and continues to cooperate with Microsoft.
The Information, a US technology website, previously reported that Google and Joint Development Technology have developed a new generation of TPUs, which will be produced in 2026.
Market evaluation, starting from 2026, AI accelerates chips towards decentralization and competition among diversified manufacturers, among which ASIC chips become the key to boost the continuous growth of AI chips.
The legal person pointed out that the demand for AI applications to drive high-speed computing has grown significantly, and the demand for advanced semiconductor wafer processing below 5 nanometers is strong, and driver GPU and ASIC customers are actively putting orders in Taiwan's advanced process.
Taiwan Electric Reply Reporter Reiterated that under the promotion of smart phones and high-performance computing (HPC) applications, the number of product design decisions for Telwan Electric 2nm technology in the first two years will be higher than the same period of 3nm and 5nm.
Market expects that the NTD 2nm process will increase in volume in the fourth quarter of this year. According to the investor's legal person, the number of 2 nanometer tape out of NTF in the first year will be twice as high as the 5 nanometer process; the number of tape out of NTF in the second year will be 4 times.
Donghai is also optimistic about the development of ASIC server solutions.Donghai analyzed in mid-August legal representative briefing that in 2024, about 20% of the group AI servers will be collected. In the future, the ASIC solution will definitely be visible.Donghai and CSP customers are both cooperating in the ASIC solution field.