Long-term contracts for 12-inch silicon wafers are expected to rise next year

Industry surveys estimate that the price of new long-term contracts for 12-inch epitaxial wafers will increase by 15% to 25%, while the price of polished wafers may increase by more than 40%, with some second-tier customers seeing increases of over 50%, and there is still room for further price increases in 2028.

Currently, the spot price of 12-inch silicon wafers continues to rise. Analysts predict that the spot price may surpass existing long-term contract prices in the fourth quarter of this year, becoming an important support for the renegotiation of new long-term contracts in 2027.

From the demand side, analysts believe that AI will continue to drive demand for advanced logic chips. Overall CoWoS capacity is projected to increase by 70.9% year-on-year in 2027, while shipments of GPU and AI ASIC chips are projected to increase by 44.9% year-on-year. Overall shipments of Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA CPUs are also projected to increase by 36% year-on-year, which will simultaneously boost 12-inch wafer starts and silicon interposer demand.

Memory capacity expansion is another source of demand support. Analysts predict that DRAM bit supply will only increase by 22% year-on-year in 2027, which will still be insufficient to fully support the growth in demand.

With both prices and shipments growing in tandem, GlobalWafers' operations are expected to expand significantly starting in 2027. Analysts predict that its ASP for 12-inch silicon wafers will increase from US$92 in 2026 to US$122 in 2027, an annual increase of approximately 32.6%, and further rise to US$166 in 2028, an annual increase of approximately 36.9%.

Shipments of 12-inch silicon wafers are estimated to increase from 11,907 kwpq in 2026 to 16,174 kwpq in 2027 and 21,237 kwpq in 2028.

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