SEMICON West: The Path to a $1 Trillion Future

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

After more than 50 years in San Francisco, SEMICON West moved its 2025 show to Phoenix, which is significant because it highlights the importance of Arizona as a semiconductor and tech hub. Though the show will be back in San Francisco in 2026, the overwhelmingly warm welcome SEMI received from Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, and ASU President Michael Crowe—who has been responsible for ASU repeatedly achieving the U.S. News and World Reports most innovative university ranking—was remarked upon repeatedly. All indications are that SEMICON West may well be back in Phoenix after that 2026 season.

This year’s theme was “The Path to $1T: Shaping a Sustainable Future in Talent, Technology, and Trade.” One trillion dollars is the market benchmark the semiconductor industry expects to hit by 2030, at a minimum, with some saying the figure is closer to $1.3T. SEMI America’s head, Joe Stockunas, kicked off the day with some impressive statistics about this year’s SEMICON show, which saw a 45% growth in exhibitors and with 60% more attendees anticipated over last year’s show. The show boasts an impressive 86 event sponsors, 63 content sessions, and over 500 speakers. This year, they added a special recognition component to the show with the first-ever Silicon Silver Medal award, which was received by Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, in a banquet event held at the historic Heard Museum in Phoenix on Monday evening.

Stockunas then handed the microphone off to Ajit Machoca, president and CEO of SEMI who commented, “I remember the days of feast and famine in this industry,” and that some of his colleagues believe he is too conservative in his growth projections for the industry, with over 150 new fabs coming up by 2030 and over $7 billion in projected investments in data centers. He also cautioned the audience not to be misled by those who say Moore’s law is at its end—at least not for the semiconductor industry—as 2 nanometers is moving swiftly into the angstrom era.

Machoca spent a fair bit of time discussing sustainability as a focus of SEMI and SEMICON West. He noted that the threat posed by PFAS is a very real one and they are working with governments on the issue. He also said that though the industry must not be paralyzed by geopolitical tensions, it must be vigilant and mindful about potential supply chain disruptions and continue to plan accordingly.

Next up was Gov. Hobbs, who was announced, not just as Arizona’s governor, but as “the semiconductor governor.” Arizona has the highest level of semiconductor investment in the country. She stated that in Arizona, “vision becomes opportunity and opportunity becomes action,” citing a long tech legacy that goes back originally to Motorola in 1956 and culminating in a record level investment in U.S. fab by TSMC in 2021. (TSMC completed the first of four planned fabs over a year ago, and it has been producing some of the highest-tech chips in the world there.) Arizon’s high-tech roster of “blue chip” companies includes ASL, Intel, ASML, ONSEMI, Applied Materials, NXP, and Nvidia.

Interestingly—and something this Arizona resident did not know—is that one reason Arizona is viewed so favorably by the semiconductor industry is that it has a 100-year plan for water and a robust plan for redundant power. Water is a popular local topic for Arizona communities and residents, and this factoid made me both proud and hopeful.

Wrapping up, Gov Hobbs said to the large audience of CEOs, engineers, and semiconductor industry worker-bees, “You have my commitment: No state will do more to support the semiconductor industry,” and mentioned again that Arizona boasts the most reliable energy grid in the country.

The next portion of the summit was CEO presentations. Sesha Varadarajan, SVP Global Products Group for Lam Research, spoke on “AI in Every Layer: Future-Ready Strategy for Technology and Talent.” An engaging speaker, he stated more clearly what had already been alluded to, that AI is the driver for technology, and more to the point, that it will be vital in helping us achieve the “explosive innovation” that will be required to achieve the next levels in AI hardware, software and power solutions that will be required to support $1T and beyond.

He emphasized that transformative innovation in power consumption is vital as power is, perhaps, the most significant barrier we face to progress, and that this, with the discovery of new materials and packaging options, is as important as ever, and “requires us all to shift left in our innovation.”  He outlined four key trends that Lam sees as pivotal for the future of semiconductors: thinner materials, taller structures, smaller features—to the aforementioned angstrom level—and advanced packaging solutions.

He also emphasized that talent is a huge barrier to progress and said that the existing two-million “man” skilled labor gap is projected to be three million by 2030. “We have to become consumers of AI and high-power compute to solve the workforce shortage problems they are creating,” he said, and that the “fundamental responsibility of everyone in the room is to address this talent gap.”

Lam Research received the SEMI North America award this year for its cryogenic etching technology, which achieves next-level miniaturization while significantly reducing energy and carbon footprint.

Jon Kemp, CEO-elect of DuPont Electronics spin-off Qnity rounded out the morning with his presentation, “Stronger Together—Building a Resilient Future of Semiconductors.” Qnity, a show sponsor, is poised to become one of the largest and broadest material suppliers for the electronics industry, focusing on two segments: semiconductor technologies and interconnect solutions, “serving everything from wafer fabrication and advanced packaging to interconnects/PCBs and displays,” per Qnity.

Kemp noted an unprecedented level of direct involvement by OEMs in investment and materials. “This shift signals a deeper level of involvement and an opportunity for co-innovation,” he said, emphasizing the need for transparency in our supply chains in order to achieve innovation at the pace needed, and echoed earlier speakers in his comment that, “Clearly, we are at a pivotal moment with unlimited potential.”

All agreed that high-performance computing, both edge computing and the data centers needed to operate it, was perhaps the biggest market driver and biggest challenge for the future of innovation and technology. After the morning presentations, the expo opened, and I heard more than one person saying that they had not expected it to be so big.

SEMICON West, the Expo, took place Oct. 7–9, and the conference and speaker schedule was full-up, from preshow events held on Oct. 6 through Friday, when the expo officially closed. By all accounts, this may be one of the largest events the Phoenix Convention Center has ever hosted, and the expectation is certainly that SEMICON West will return.