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Ann Cao

Agentic artificial intelligence and advanced packaging technology will be key growth drivers for China’s chip industry in coming years, as the country is expected to increase its share of chipmaking capacity to nearly half of the world’s total by 2028.
According to data revealed at Semicon China, the world’s largest chip industry trade show, China’s share of wafer fabrication capacity for mainstream processes was expected to reach 42 per cent of global capacity by 2028.
That would mark a rapid increase from 32 per cent in 2025, according to Lily Feng, president of SEMI China, the Chinese branch of chip industry association SEMI and the organiser of the event.
The annual trade show, in Shanghai from Wednesday to Friday, expects to welcome more than 180,000 attendees this year, making it the world’s largest professional semiconductor expo, Feng said.
A key factor expected to drive growth in China’s chipmaking capacity will be the adoption of AI agents, a trend highlighted by a few speakers during the opening session of the event on Wednesday.
Such agents – software programs capable of performing complex tasks autonomously – are the latest buzzword in China’s tech community after the rise of OpenClaw, an OpenAI-backed agent framework that has taken the industry by storm.
“What makes OpenClaw noteworthy is not only that it is a phenomenal product, but also the crucial fact it revealed that AI agents consume far more computing power than previous formats of AI products,” said Sun Guoliang, senior vice-president and chief product officer‌ at Shanghai-based MetaX Integrated Circuits.
The adoption of AI agents increases the need for computing power used for AI inferencing – the “doing” part of artificial intelligence, where a trained model stops learning and turns its knowledge into real-world results.
“Inference is set to accelerate as language models continue to get smarter, smaller, cheaper and more open,” said Mario Morales, vice-president and head of corporate strategy and partnerships at AMD, the US AI chipmaker and smaller rival to Nvidia. “AMD is aligning with the market trends.”
The remarks come at a time when China is set to further step up its quest for chip self-sufficiency, especially after Beijing’s latest five-year plan called for breakthroughs in critical technologies across the semiconductor value chain.

Meanwhile, advanced packaging was also highlighted as a factor that would help the country bring forward its chipmaking technology under the US export controls that restricted its access to advanced fabs like those of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
Zheng Li, CEO of JCET Group, one of China’s major chip packaging service providers, said the industry was now undergoing a leap in chip packaging technologies, with the next-generation technology – so-called atomic-level packaging – aiming to advance the roughness of packaging to less than 0.2 nanometres (nm) compared with 5nm under the current 2.5D packaging technology.
“The focus has shifted from how to increase the number of transistors per unit area to how to improve chip quality,” said Zheng, adding that advanced packaging would become a core pathway to industry development in the post-Moore’s Law era.
Still, challenges remained, according to Wang Ning, president of the China Electronics Chamber of Commerce, who said advanced process nodes, core equipment and materials as well as electronic design automation software were bottleneck areas that needed more investment.
Some leaders of China’s chip industry attended the opening session, including Zhao Jinrong, chairman of chip equipment maker Naura Technology, Bai Peng, chairman and president of chip foundry Hua Hong Semiconductor, and Wei Shaojun, vice-president of the China Semiconductor Industry Association.
As in previous years, Nvidia, the US chip giant that is seeking to return to the Chinese market with the latest US approvals on the export of its H200 processor, was absent from the event.


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China on track to account for nearly half of world wafer capacity in two years, organiser of world’s largest chip industry trade show says


China on track to account for nearly half of world wafer capacity in two years, organiser of world’s largest chip industry trade show says.


Semicon China: AI, advanced packaging set to drive country’s chip industry growth

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}China on track to account for nearly half of world wafer capacity in two years, organiser of world’s largest chip industry trade show says

China on track to account for nearly half of world wafer capacity in two years, organiser of world’s largest chip industry trade show says