Interview: SEMI CEO sees US$3 trillion chip industry by 2035, as trusted partners reshape supply chain

The $3T figure isn't a forecast—it's a structural lock-in. AI and quantum aren't parallel demand curves; they converge on a single bottleneck: advanced packaging and interconnect. CoWoS capacity remains the industry's chokepoint through 2027, and SEMI's 'trusted partner' framing is the official codification of a permanently bifurcated supply chain, implying 15-25% structural capex inflation across the ecosystem. The competitive battleground has shifted from transistor density to control of the packaging-memory stack. TSMC's CoWoS-L, Samsung's HBM3E, and Intel's EMIB are the real moats—not node leadership. Over the next 12-24 months, expect AI capex digestion in H2 2026, followed by a quantum-safe hardware procurement wave in 2027 as the next growth vector. The deeper signal: 'trusted ecosystem' doctrine is replacing the single CHIPS Act framework. Subsidy-driven fab duplication across Japan, Korea, and the EU will create permanent efficiency losses—this is geopolitical pricing, not a cyclical correction. The industry is no longer optimizing for yield; it's optimizing for sovereignty. That repricing is already embedded in the numbers.