AI boom drives memory market past foundry revenues by 2026

The ongoing, AI-driven investment cycle is expected to push global semiconductor sales to new record highs by 2026. The memory market is benefiting particularly strongly, with recent TrendForce data indicating it is set to reach a volume more than double the revenue of the wafer foundry industry. TrendForce forecasts that global memory revenue will reach approximately $551.6 billion in 2026, driven by persistently tight capacity and significantly rising prices. In contrast, global foundry revenue is projected to rise to $218.7 billion—also a record, but far behind the memory sector. This widening gap reflects a new memory supercycle, structurally different from previous upturns, which is fundamentally being shaped by the shift from AI training to large-scale inference