You’ll find a lot of negative numbers in this year’s financials for our IW U.S. 500 top semiconductor and equipment companies—17 out of 23 companies tracked faced negative net income change and 14 reported negative revenue changes.

Intel was downright hammered.  If you remove them from the data, however, revenues for the rest of the sector grew 7.6%, though net income still fell 2.6%

2024 was a growth year for the worldwide industry, however. Gartner says that worldwide semiconductor revenue in 2024 increased 18.1% year-over-year, thanks to increased sales of graphics processing units (GPUs) and AI processors used in data centers.

U.S. semiconductor companies excel at R&D but manufacturing still relies heavily on offshore fabs. The CHIPS and Science Act provided funding for construction of new silicon manufacturing capacity at home but it will take a while for those fabs to spin up.

If you break out chip makers from the equipment suppliers (like Applied Materials and Lam Research), the chip makers (minus Intel) outperformed the equipment producers. If the CHIPS Act was really driving near-term growth, those equipment makers would be booming. Instead, revenues were down 4.7% and earnings were flat (up 0.8%)