AMD Ranks Third in Global Chip Design

According to market research firm TrendForce, the rapid expansion of AI applications is driving strong demand for GPUs, CPUs, ASICs, interconnect products, and other advanced semiconductor solutions. In its latest report, TrendForce said combined revenue of the world's top 10 fabless IC design companies reached more than $141.45 billion in the second quarter of 2026, representing a 73% year-over-year increase.

NVIDIA remained the world's largest fabless IC design company, while AMD climbed to third place as rising demand for CPUs in the era of agentic AI strengthened its position. Qualcomm, meanwhile, fell to fourth place as its smartphone business weakened.

NVIDIA reported second-quarter revenue growth of 99% year over year to nearly $91.16 billion, accounting for 64% of the combined revenue of the top 10 companies. Hyperscale cloud service providers remained its major customers, while Neo Cloud providers, sovereign AI initiatives, and enterprise customers also made significant contributions to revenue growth.

Broadcom ranked second, with second-quarter revenue increasing 112% year over year to more than $18.89 billion. Its custom silicon business benefited from the initial shipments of OpenAI's first ASIC, which Broadcom helped design, as well as Google's TPU 8i. Its networking business also recorded strong growth alongside XPU demand. Six major custom-chip customers, including frontier AI model developers such as Anthropic and OpenAI, are expected to remain key drivers of demand for its XPU products.

AMD ranked third, with second-quarter revenue exceeding $11.53 billion. As agentic AI gains momentum, the importance of CPUs is increasing again. AMD's data-center CPU revenue has reached a new high for five consecutive quarters, helping the company continue to gain share in the Intel-based x86 server market.

OmniVision Technologies ranked tenth, with semiconductor design revenue of approximately $838 million in the second quarter. Although memory price fluctuations affected its smartphone and automotive CIS businesses, emerging applications such as action cameras continued to grow strongly. In analog ICs, the company has also expanded into optical communications EICs, including transimpedance amplifier (TIA) and driver chips.