AI Chip Market Projected to Hit $677 Billion as Inference Gains Dominance

DC Market Insights forecasts a 13.85% compound annual growth rate through 2035, marking a transition in how capital is allocated across the compute stack. While GPUs remain the dominant force, capturing 76.9% of the 2025 market value at $142.39 billion, custom AI ASICs and SoCs are rising as the fastest-growing segment. These custom solutions are expected to see a 19.61% annual growth rate, as hyperscale providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft prioritize performance-per-watt and lower costs per token.

Inference is becoming the primary driver of this long-term expansion. By 2035, inference functions are projected to account for 64.8% of the total market value, reaching $439.05 billion. This sustained demand is reinforced by massive, multi-year supply agreements, such as the 10 GW deployment deal between OpenAI and Broadcom. These commitments indicate that AI hardware procurement is decoupling from traditional annual cycles, tethering future growth to the physical realities of power infrastructure, advanced packaging, and memory bandwidth availability.