Nvidia earned nearly as much as its next 9 fabless rivals combined last year

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Demand for AI set to continue.

Nvidia Hopper H100 die shot
(Image credit: Nvidia)

The global semiconductor industry saw explosive growth in 2024, mainly driven by sales of processors for AI applications, according to TrendForce. The Top 10 largest fabless chip developers earned nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars last year; roughly half of that sum came from Nvidia.

The largest fabless chip designers generated $249.8 billion in revenue, up 49% from the previous year. The growth boomed due to skyrocketing demand for AI GPUs, ASICs, adjacent chips (e.g., network processors, DPUs), datacenter CPUs, and recovered demand for client PCs. Market consolidation also intensified, with the Top 5 firms now accounting for over 90% of the revenue among the Top 10.

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Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

12 Comments Comment from the forums
  • emike09
    Yet they still gave us the RTX 5000 series. You'd think the last two years of excellent sales would have spurred a bigger push in R&D. Here's hoping the 6000 series takes advantage of this massive capital and we can have a repeat of the 3000 series - huge jump in performance and a drop in price compared to the 2000 series.
    Reply
  • cyrusfox
    emike09 said:
    Yet they still gave us the RTX 5000 series. You'd think the last two years of excellent sales would have spurred a bigger push in R&D. Here's hoping the 6000 series takes advantage of this massive capital and we can have a repeat of the 3000 series - huge jump in performance and a drop in price compared to the 2000 series.
    I truly think they will only ever be priced against competition, and as they have none, the moon is where it will continue to be unless either AMD or Intel can begin to vie for the high end.
    Reply
  • DS426
    emike09 said:
    Yet they still gave us the RTX 5000 series. You'd think the last two years of excellent sales would have spurred a bigger push in R&D. Here's hoping the 6000 series takes advantage of this massive capital and we can have a repeat of the 3000 series - huge jump in performance and a drop in price compared to the 2000 series.
    R&D??? That's not the problem, it's QA/QC and allocating supplies to markets other than AI. And nVidia wasn't generous or such in "giving us RTX 5000 series." It's the worst gaming dGPU launch that nVidia has possibly ever had, and if anything, AMD has closed the gap... even while "only going mid-tier" this generation.

    There's nothing to learn -- it's always going to be following the money trail. nVidia wouldn't have the highest tech market cap in the world if it was some kind of "righteous" tech or gaming company; they maximized their potential as a core dGPU company and foundation with CUDA and the professional dev and enterprise community, so here we find ourselves today as is.

    Sorry bud and no offense to nVidia fans but I think a lot of mindsights are far from practical life.
    Reply
  • renz496
    emike09 said:
    Yet they still gave us the RTX 5000 series. You'd think the last two years of excellent sales would have spurred a bigger push in R&D. Here's hoping the 6000 series takes advantage of this massive capital and we can have a repeat of the 3000 series - huge jump in performance and a drop in price compared to the 2000 series.
    Process node. 50 series still on the same node as 40 series. Cheaper? TSMC keep raising the price of their mature node. 5nm is not even their most bleeding edge node and we still see price increase on that.
    Reply
  • TheOtherOne
    If any poor little casual gamer like me had any hopes of "decent" priced gaming GPUs, now you know why those good old days are NEVER coming back. 😞
    Reply
  • blppt
    emike09 said:
    Yet they still gave us the RTX 5000 series. You'd think the last two years of excellent sales would have spurred a bigger push in R&D. Here's hoping the 6000 series takes advantage of this massive capital and we can have a repeat of the 3000 series - huge jump in performance and a drop in price compared to the 2000 series.
    We might be reaching a point where this type of rendering architecture just can't provide any massive gains anymore without ridiculous power consumption---might need some kind of revolutionary product.
    Reply
  • ekio
    Nvidia became the Intel of 20 years ago.

    That will not last forever.
    Reply
  • hannibal
    AI-market will increase. Production capacity does not increase in few upcoming years...
    So no price cuts for at least 5 years!

    But we may see higher increase in speed along with higher increase in price...
    Reply
  • bit_user
    blppt said:
    We might be reaching a point where this type of rendering architecture just can't provide any massive gains anymore without ridiculous power consumption---might need some kind of revolutionary product.
    They are trying to do it via AI and neural rendering technologies. The technology is still getting its legs under it. DLSS is just the start.

    It doesn't help that many people are using ridiculously high-res 4k+ displays, which is really more than you need for gaming. So, no wonder Nvidia and AMD don't want to directly compute all of those pixels - it's not necessary and not an efficient use of silicon.
    Reply
  • blppt
    bit_user said:
    They are trying to do it via AI and neural rendering technologies. The technology is still getting its legs under it. DLSS is just the start.

    It doesn't help that many people are using ridiculously high-res 4k+ displays, which is really more than you need for gaming. So, no wonder Nvidia and AMD don't want to directly compute all of those pixels - it's not necessary and not an efficient use of silicon.
    Not good enough. I want a QUANTUM COMPUTING based GPU. ;)
    Reply