Semicon China: AI agents and advanced packaging set to drive domestic chipmaking surge

Lead and outlook

China is on course to capture a much larger slice of global chipmaking capacity as demand for AI agents and advanced packaging ramps up, organisers of Semicon China said. Lily Feng, president of SEMI China (SEMI中国), told the trade show that the country's share of wafer fabrication capacity for mainstream processes is forecast to rise to about 42% of global capacity by 2028, up from roughly 32% in 2025. That rapid expansion underpins Beijing’s push to shore up domestic supply chains. Short question: what does that mean for global competition? A lot.

AI agents and compute appetite

Speakers at the Shanghai event highlighted a new driver: agentic artificial intelligence — autonomous software "agents" that coordinate tasks without constant human direction — which reportedly consume far more compute than prior AI models. Sun Guoliang, senior vice-president and chief product officer at MetaX Integrated Circuits, said the surge in agent workloads is a key justification for new fabs and node investments. It has been reported that OpenClaw, an OpenAI‑backed agent framework, helped crystallise industry attention on the higher compute and packaging demands these agents create.

Packaging, policy and geopolitics

Advanced packaging — techniques that stack and interconnect chips to boost performance without relying solely on leading-edge lithography — was flagged as the other major growth area. That matters because US export controls and broader technology decoupling have constrained China’s access to the most advanced manufacturing equipment, prompting heavier investment in packaging, mature-node fabs and domestic toolchains. Policymakers see capacity growth as economic security; foreign governments see it as a strategic shift. Expect tensions over supply chains and trade policy to shape how quickly China’s ambitions translate into global market share.

Trade show scale and implications

Semicon China, which expects more than 180,000 attendees this year, billed itself as the world’s largest professional semiconductor expo — a vivid sign of how central chips remain to China’s tech strategy. For Western firms and policymakers, the questions are practical as well as political: how to engage with an industry that is both a commercial market and a national priority? The answers will help determine whether the next wave of chip growth is cooperative, competitive — or a bit of both.