TrendForce’s latest report reveals a 73% surge in revenue among top fabless chipmakers driven by broader AI hardware demand, with AMD making a significant leap to third place amid rising CPU importance.
TrendForce’s latest quarterly ranking of fabless chipmakers shows how sharply the AI hardware market has broadened. In the second quarter of 2026, the combined revenue of the world’s top 10 fabless integrated-circuit designers rose 73% year on year to more than $141.45 billion, with demand spreading well beyond graphics processors into CPUs, ASICs and interconnect products, according to TrendForce.
Nvidia stayed in first place by a wide margin. TrendForce said the company’s quarterly revenue climbed 99% from a year earlier to nearly $91.16 billion, giving it about 64% of the total revenue generated by the top 10. The research firm said Nvidia has also broadened its NVLink Fusion ecosystem in an attempt to reach more custom-chip customers and deepen its role in AI infrastructure.
Broadcom held second place after a strong quarter in custom silicon and networking. TrendForce said one of the first ASICs Broadcom designed for OpenAI and Google moved into supply during the period, while growth in its networking business accelerated alongside wider deployment of XPU systems. Broadcom’s revenue increased 112% to more than $18.89 billion.
The biggest shift came from AMD, which moved up to third place. TrendForce said the company benefited from the rising strategic importance of CPUs in AI systems, where central processors are increasingly needed to coordinate accelerators, scale workloads and support interconnect infrastructure. AMD’s revenue topped $11.53 billion, and its data-centre CPU business set a new record for the fifth consecutive quarter. The company also took additional share from Intel in the x86 server market.
Qualcomm fell to fourth as pressure persisted in smartphone chips, even though its automotive business continued to expand at double-digit rates for a 23rd straight quarter. TrendForce said weaker modem demand in the latest iPhone models added to the strain. Qualcomm’s quarterly revenue came to more than $8.5 billion. Industry analysis from KitGuru also pointed to a 20% year-on-year fall in desktop CPU shipments in the same quarter, underlining the uneven nature of the broader PC market even as AMD gained share across desktop, mobile and server segments.
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