The numbers keep going up. China spent 7,841 billion yuan on semiconductor investment in 2025, up 17.2% year-on-year, per CINNO Research. That is a lot of sand money.
SEMI dropped its 2025 materials market report on May 12. Global semiconductor materials hit $73.2 billion, up 6.8%. The packaging segment was the surprise: $27.4 billion, growing 9.3% as gold prices and advanced substrate demand pushed up costs. Wafer fab materials were $45.8 billion, up 5.4%. Photomasks, photoresist, wet chemicals all grew over 10%.
None of this is a surprise if you have been watching the fabs go up around Shanghai and Shenzhen.
The auto chip story is where things get interesting. 36kr published a long piece on the car chip landscape in early February. The headline is correct: some players are getting a seat at the table, others are leaving. Intel walked away from automotive chips in 2025 after nearly 50 years. STMicroelectronics and NXP both saw Q3 2025 revenue dip. Meanwhile, Chinese companies are pushing hard.
BYD’s IGBT modules have passed Infineon in domestic installations. That is not marketing spin. The company’s BYD9000 chip uses a 4 nm process and targets the Qualcomm 8155 level. Xiaopeng’s Turing chip got a production定点 (design win) from Volkswagen. NIO’s Shenji NX9031 cuts BOM cost by about 10,000 yuan per vehicle. Li Auto has its M100 in development.
The most telling stat: China sold 16.49 million new energy vehicles in 2025, up 28.2%. Every one of those cars needs more silicon than a gasoline car.
On the broader chip front, Omdia predicts 2026 global semiconductor revenue will hit nearly $1.4 trillion, up 62.7%. Memory is the tailwind. DRAM doubles this year. NAND could hit 4x 2025 levels. That is wild growth from a base that was already huge.
晶晨股份 (Amlogic) says its 6 nm chips will ship over 30 million units in 2026, up from 9 million in 2025. Wi-Fi 6 chips will pass 10 million. The company spent 15.52 billion yuan on R&D in 2025, with cumulative R&D over 41 billion yuan in three years. These are real numbers from a public company.
I am skeptical about some of the foundry yield claims floating around. But the volume data from Amlogic, the material revenue from SEMI, and the auto chip supply chain shift tracked by 36kr all point in one direction: China’s chip ecosystem is scaling, unevenly but persistently.
The open question is whether Omdia’s 2027 timeline for memory supply relief holds. If AI demand keeps its current trajectory, the bottleneck lasts longer. If it softens, the fab buildout looks overdone.
Either way, the factories keep running.