According to the Economic Daily News in Taiwan, AI demand for high end process capacity is lifting the silicon wafer market faster than expected. Industry players say customers are pulling in shipments ahead of schedule: goods planned for the end of this year have already been taken, while some orders set for early 2027 started a quarter early. Wafer suppliers GlobalWafers, Taisera and WaferWorks are negotiating new contract prices, with higher rates as the clear direction, marking an upcycle that returns after more than three years, while each supplier raises the share of long term agreements to secure supply.
SEMI expects the global semiconductor materials market to grow at a double digit percentage rate in 2026 with a similar pace in 2027. GlobalWafers chair Doris Hsu forecasts a significant revenue increase next year and sees spot wafer prices rising in the second half of 2026 and the opening quarter of 2027, with long term agreement prepayments set to climb noticeably in early 2027. WaferWorks is negotiating price adjustments, has finished sampling square wafers while deepening work in high end packaging plus optical transport. UMC also entered the silicon photonics race on mature nodes, winning orders of optical module maker Innolight, where high end PIC wafer prices run about seven times a standard CMOS process.
For the domestic electronic component supply chain, rising materials prices act as an early signal of upstream cost recovery. Wafer price increases will pass through foundry and packaging stages to component list prices, adding lead time as well as price variables for device makers at the same time. With orders pulled forward amid spreading long term agreements, the window to lock volumes of key part numbers is moving earlier, with supply visibility together with stocking rhythm now outweighing unit price in production planning, making early agreements alongside alternative sourcing the main thread of procurement in coming quarters.