There’s a growing divide in the $530 billion semiconductor industry between the companies that are riding the artificial intelligence wave and those that aren’t. And looking at the early returns from this earnings season, that gulf could soon widen into an abyss.
"Without AI, the market would be very sad,” Christophe Fouquet, chief executive of ASML Holding, said last week on a conference call after the Dutch chip production equipment maker cut its sales forecast for 2025 due to sluggish demand in everything other than AI.
ASML’s results sparked a new round of worries about the health of the chip industry, which is being hurt by weakness in key businesses such as personal computers and automobiles. It also has been caught up in the rising geopolitical tensions between the United States and China that could cut off access to the Chinese chip market, which is the biggest in the world.
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