Market
Wafer Shipments Recovered in 2025; Wafer Revenue Did Not
SEMI's Silicon Manufacturers Group counts every polished, epitaxial and SOI silicon wafer shipped worldwide. Volume fell 17% from the 2022 peak to 2024 as chipmakers burned through inventory, then rose 5.8% in 2025 to 12,973 million square inches. Revenue kept falling, to $11.4 billion, because the recovery was concentrated in 300mm wafers for AI logic and memory while 200mm and mature-node demand stayed soft and long-term contract prices reset lower.
| Year | Shipments (million sq. in.) | Revenue | Revenue per sq. in. (computed) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 12,407 | $11.2B | $0.90 |
| 2021 | 14,165 | $12.6B | $0.89 |
| 2022 | 14,713 | $13.8B | $0.94 |
| 2023 | 12,602 | $12.3B | $0.98 |
| 2024 | 12,266 | $11.5B | $0.94 |
| 2025 | 12,973 | $11.4B | $0.88 |
Shipments kept climbing in 2026: 3,275 million square inches in the first quarter, up 13% year on year, and 3,573 in the second quarter, up 7.4% and the strongest quarter since 2022. SEMI's chairman described the market as two-track, with steady advanced-node demand and a slow recovery everywhere else. SUMCO shows the squeeze: its sales fell 1% in the first quarter of 2026 and it posted an operating loss, citing weak demand for 200mm and smaller wafers while 300mm stayed strong.
The flow
Seven Steps Inside the Wafer Maker Before the Fab Sees a Wafer
Wafer making starts from electronic-grade polysilicon, refined from metallurgical silicon at 98% purity to 9N to 11N (99.9999999% to 99.999999999%). Polysilicon makers are covered on Quartzite to Polysilicon. The wafer maker melts the polysilicon with a trace of boron or phosphorus to set resistivity, pulls a single-crystal ingot, and turns it into wafers through slicing, grinding, etching and polishing. Every step is done in-house; the big five do not outsource crystal growth or polishing, and a fab qualifies each wafer maker's product line separately, which takes two to four years for a new 300mm supplier.
300mm wafers are now most of the volume. Logic fabs mostly buy polished wafers and grow their own thin epitaxial layers in the fab; memory fabs buy polished prime or epi wafers; power, analog and RF makers buy thick-epi, float-zone and SOI wafers on 200mm and smaller. The specification sheet the fab buys against is on Wafer Specifications.
The five makers
Five Makers Supply About 90% of 300mm Wafers
| Maker | Home | 300mm share, 2025 (approx.) | Products and position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shin-Etsu Handotai (Shin-Etsu Chemical) | Japan | About 28% | Largest maker; polished, epi, SOI under Soitec's Smart Cut license; plants in Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan and the US (SEH America, Vancouver, Washington) |
| SUMCO | Japan | About 25% | Second; strong in low-defect 300mm for DRAM and leading-edge logic; operating loss in the first quarter of 2026 on weak 200mm demand |
| GlobalWafers | Taiwan | About 15% | Third; owns the former MEMC and Topsil; opened the first new US 300mm plant in Sherman, Texas in May 2025 |
| Siltronic | Germany | About 12% | Europe's maker; 300mm plants in Germany and Singapore, including the Singapore FabNext fab; float-zone silicon |
| SK Siltron | South Korea | About 11% | SK Group company and a main supplier to SK hynix and Samsung; also makes SiC wafers in Michigan |
Together the five hold about 90% of 300mm supply. Shares are industry estimates; none of the five publish a share, and figures vary by a few points between sources. The two Japanese makers alone supply about half the world's 300mm wafers, a single-country concentration comparable to the Netherlands in EUV lithography. Germany's regulator let GlobalWafers' bid for Siltronic lapse in 2022 without approval, so the five remain separate.
China
China Has About an Eighth of 300mm Capacity, Built for Its Own Fabs
China has built 300mm wafer capacity faster than any other country, under policy that treats wafers as a localization target. The largest maker is National Silicon Industry Group (NSIG), through its Shanghai Xinsheng (Zing Semiconductor) and Simgui SOI units. Others include TCL Zhonghuan, Eswin Microelectronics in Xi'an and Hangzhou Lion Semiconductor.
| Measure | Figure | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Mainland 300mm capacity | About 1.05 million wafers a month | About 12% of world capacity; one industry report, not company data |
| Polished share of that capacity | About two-thirds | Epi capacity is the smaller part |
| Localization, polished 300mm | About 35% | Share of China's own 300mm polished demand met by domestic makers |
| Localization, 300mm epi | About 15% | Leading-edge epi still imported from Japan, Taiwan and Korea |
| Largest domestic maker | NSIG | Zing Semiconductor (polished, epi) and Simgui (SOI), Shanghai |
China's new 300mm lines mostly serve its own mature-node logic, NAND and DRAM fabs, which keeps domestic wafers out of the global contract market and adds to the price pressure on 200mm and mature 300mm supply. Leading-edge logic wafers for TSMC, Samsung and Intel still come from the Japanese, Taiwanese, German and Korean makers.
US supply
Sherman, Texas Is the First US Plant to Make 300mm Wafers
- Made in US
- US planned
- Made abroad
| Site | Location | Makes | Status | US status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GlobalWafers America | Sherman, Texas | 300mm polished and epi wafers, crystal growth through polishing | Opened May 2025; $3.5B first phases, $4B more announced; CHIPS award up to $406M | Made in US |
| MEMC (GlobalWafers) | St. Peters, Missouri | 300mm silicon-on-insulator wafers | CHIPS-backed SOI line for defense and aerospace parts | US planned |
| SEH America (Shin-Etsu) | Vancouver, Washington | Crystal growing, wafering and polishing | Long-running plant; wafer sizes not disclosed; expansion proposed in 2022 | Some US volume |
| SK Siltron CSS | Bay City and Auburn, Michigan | Silicon carbide wafers, not silicon | See SiC Substrates | Made in US |
| Placeholder: add further US wafer sites from the dataset | ||||
Before Sherman, no US plant made 300mm wafers, so every 300mm wafer used in US fabs was imported, mostly from Japan, Taiwan and Korea. GlobalWafers' CHIPS award also funds converting part of its existing Texas epitaxy plant to silicon carbide epi. The Arizona, Texas, Ohio and New York fabs now ramping will each consume tens of thousands of 300mm wafers a month, so most US fab demand will still be met by imports for years.
Wafer sizes
300mm Is the Last Wafer Size Change
| Diameter | Area vs. 200mm | Who uses it | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 150mm and smaller | 0.56x | Analog, discretes, MEMS, SiC, GaAs, InP | Legacy silicon; mainstream for compound wafers |
| 200mm | 1.0x | Analog, power, MCUs, sensors, specialty logic | Fully utilized fabs; little new tool supply |
| 300mm | 2.25x | All leading-edge logic, DRAM, NAND, most foundry | Most of the world's wafer area |
| 450mm | 5.1x | No one | Industry program abandoned around 2016 |
Area ratios are computed from the diameters. The move from 200mm to 300mm gave 2.25 times the area per wafer and took the industry about a decade. A 450mm move would have required every tool maker, wafer maker and chipmaker to commit together; the Global 450 Consortium in New York wound down around 2016 without a production fab.
Record
Page Record
- Covers
- Silicon wafer market, flow, the five makers, China capacity, US plants and wafer sizes. Folded in: Silicon Ingot and Wafer Production Basics
- Sources
- SEMI SMG annual wafer reports (February 2025, February 2026) and quarterly reports (April and July 2026); SUMCO first-quarter 2026 results (May 2026); GlobalWafers Sherman opening (Evertiq, May 2025); US Department of Commerce CHIPS award to GlobalWafers; 300mm shares and China capacity from industry estimates (China wafer industry report, 2026), not company data
- Last verified
- October 2026