智通财经APP获悉，随着2025年临近，华尔街金融巨头美国银行(Bank of America)的分析师团队发布了明年美股市场“首选芯片股名单”，其中包括美股2023年以来投资热度爆表的“AI芯片三巨头”。在美银分析师团队看来，明年芯片股仍有可能是美股表现最亮眼的板块之一，并且涨幅贡献力量有望从全面受益于AI热潮的“AI芯片三巨头”等芯片公司扩大至模拟芯片以及电动汽车芯片股等长期跑输美股大盘以及费城半导体指数的“非AI”芯片股标的。

The latest report from the Bank of America analyst team shows that one of the core driving forces behind the current "long-term bull market in US stocks" since 2023— chip stocks, has regained global investor favor after being sold off at the beginning of the earnings season, and is expected to continue attracting funds in 2025, therefore it is very likely to ignite another "crazy bull" rally and become the core focus of the US stock market.

美股芯片板块的“AI芯片三巨头”——即英伟达(NVDA.US)、博通(AVGO.US)以及迈威尔科技(MRVL.US)均位列美国银行的2025年“首选芯片股名单”，该名单上的芯片股标的还包括半导体设备巨头泛林集团(LRCX.US)、汽车芯片领军者安森美半导体(ON.US)以及EDA软件领导者之一铿腾电子(CDNS.US)。

On this list, Broadcom is undoubtedly the most dazzling chip company in the recent US stock market, and even globally. After it announced strong growth results and extremely optimistic outlook expectations for the AI ASIC chip market last Friday morning Beijing time, its stock price surged over 20% in a single day in US stock trading, and its market cap exceeded the significant milestone of one trillion dollars. On Monday, during US stock trading hours, it continued to soar over 10%, with an overall market cap nearing the 1.2 trillion dollar mark.

Among the "three AI chip giants," NVIDIA focuses on AI GPUs, while the latter two focus on the AI ASIC chip market. Customized AI ASICs can provide hardware acceleration for specific tasks, especially excelling in large-scale AI training and inference tasks, offering higher efficiency and cost-effectiveness compared to general-purpose NVIDIA GPUs. These two types of AI chips will coexist in the long term, providing the best solutions for different AI computing power demand scenarios.

With the strong demand from major global data centers for Broadcom's Ethernet Switch chips and its absolute technological leadership in inter-chip communication and high-speed data transfer between chips, Broadcom has become the most significant participant in the custom AI chip field in recent years. For instance, for Google's self-developed server AI chip—the TPU AI acceleration chip—Broadcom plays a core role, having collaborated closely with the Google team in its development and the AI training/inference acceleration library. In addition to chip design, Broadcom has also provided Google with critical inter-chip communication intellectual property and is responsible for manufacturing, testing, and packaging new chips, thereby supporting Google in expanding its new AI datacenters.

With its leading position in the AI ASIC market, Broadcom is expected to soon break NVIDIA's monopoly position in the AI chip market. Analyst Jordan Klein from Mizuho pointed out that Wall Street is paying attention to the demand for ASICs from large cloud computing companies like Google, which may be one of the reasons for NVIDIA's stock unexpectedly dropping on Friday. 'In my view, customized AI chips will continue to capture a share from NVIDIA AI GPUs every year, although NVIDIA GPUs still dominate for AI training purposes.'

The semiconductor boom cycle is far from over, and the rising chip stocks still have ample room for growth.

The team led by Bank of America Analyst Vivek Arya wrote in this research report on semiconductor stocks that "Even after a significant surge, there is still a vast upward potential for chip stocks, and we believe two different upward trend lines will emerge in 2025." In the first half of the year, investments in AI driven by the USA’s cloud computing super clients, alongside the scale of NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture AI GPU deployment, will maintain the upward momentum of these semiconductor companies closely associated with AI. In the second half, if the global economy continues to recover, market focus may shift towards inventory replenishment and the rebound of automotive production, which means that semiconductor manufacturers in the automotive/industrial sector, which have long been less crowded and significantly underperformed the Large Cap of the US stock market, are expected to regain investors' favor.

The team led by Arya at Bank of America also stated that, overall, it is expected that the overall sales of the semiconductor market in 2025 will grow by about 15% on the strong growth in 2024, reaching 725 billion dollars. "This is still a very strong pace of growth, although it is a decrease compared to this year's predicted growth rate of 20%."

The analysis team added that NVIDIA, Broadcom, and Marvell Technology are expected to continue benefiting from the market demand closely associated with data center AI chips, the super-scale cloud customers, and the explosive demand for AI computing resources from global datacenter operators, while semiconductor equipment giant Lam Research is expected to benefit from demand for flash memory and the continuous recovery of semiconductor equipment spending in the Chinese market.

In addition, the Bank of America analysis team stated that the auto chip giant ON Semiconductor, which has long underperformed the Large Cap and the PHLX Semiconductor Index, is expected to significantly benefit from the recovery of "end" demand in the electric vehicle and overall automobile sector (possibly occurring in the second half of this year), while Cadence Design Systems has long been a leader in the chip design automation field and is expected to benefit in the long term from leading chip designers such as NVIDIA, AMD, and Apple, as well as cloud computing giants like Amazon and Microsoft, accelerating the development of high-performance AI chips. Their needs for EDA software capable of designing more complex AI chips and accelerating chip design with new AI technologies are expected to continue expanding. EDA software tools are essential for chip giants like Apple, NVIDIA, and AMD in designing all types of chips, while Lithography is one of the core tools for converting chip design blueprints into actual products.

The Bank of America analysis team, led by Arya, noted in the report: "The demand boom cycle in the semiconductor market typically lasts about 2.5 years (followed by a downturn cycle lasting up to 1 year), and we are currently merely at the mid-point of this semiconductor upcycle that began in [Q4 2023]." "We expect that the sales of the memory chip market will grow again on the strong base of 2024, with an expected growth of 20% (vs a 79% year-on-year increase in 2024), and the core semiconductor market (excluding the memory sector) is expected to grow by 13%, mainly due to strong performance from datacenters. However, other sub-segments, such as Consumer Electronics, electric vehicles, the overall auto sector, and industrial sector chip products, while showing signs of recovery, may slightly decline, though the decline is significantly narrowed compared to 2024.

The extremely optimistic outlook for the semiconductor market in this Bank of America research report echoes with the latest semiconductor market size forecast report from the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS), which is bullish on the strong growth of chip demand continuing into 2025. WSTS has significantly raised its forecasts for the semiconductor market size in 2024 and 2025 in the latest autumn forecast compared to the spring forecast, predicting that the global semiconductor market will grow by 19.0% year-on-year to 627 billion dollars in 2024, and WSTS expects the 2025 semiconductor market size will grow from the base of 2024, meaning the global semiconductor market is expected to see about 11.2% growth on top of the already remarkably strong recovery trend in 2024, reaching a global market size of approximately 697 billion dollars.

WSTS expects that the growth of the semiconductor market scale in 2025 will be mainly driven by the memory chip category and AI logic chip category. It is anticipated that under the unprecedented global surge in AI deployment, the total sales growth rate of memory chips dominated by DRAM and NAND will exceed 13% in 2025, while the total sales growth rate of logic chips, including CPUs and GPUs, is expected to exceed 16%. At the same time, it is also expected that all other segmented chip markets, such as discrete devices, optoelectronics, Sensors, MCUs, and analog chips, will achieve single-digit growth rates.

For chip stocks, some potential risks cannot be ignored.

Despite the overall optimistic outlook for the semiconductor market, the Bank of America analyst team indicated in the research reports that there are still many unknown factors for 2025, with the most significant negative risk factors focused on the growth of market demand related to AI, demand in the China market, the broader macro recovery, and how the story of the established American chip giant Intel will evolve.

The Bank of America analysis team led by Aliyah added that as AI applications accelerate their penetration into business operations and the daily lives of individual consumers, this "rotation trend" from Semiconductors to Software Stocks benefiting from AI will continue into 2025. This trend may cause intermittent pressure on the rally of popular Chip Stocks, driving funds to take profits on Chip Stocks and shift towards Software Stocks. "From a positive perspective, we can see that the support policies for economic growth under Trump’s new U.S. government will drive.mergers and acquisitions.activities (especially mergers and acquisitions in the semiconductor and software markets) to restart," the Bank of America analysis team wrote.

Nevertheless, the Bank of America analysis team led by Alia emphasized in the report that chip stocks benefiting from the global deployment of the AI surge, especially the "three AI chip giants", are likely to continue to achieve strong growth, at least until the second half of this year. In addition to these three popular chip stocks and the aforementioned "preferred chip stock list", the Bank of America analysis team stated that chip giants such as ARM (ARM.US), Micron (MU.US), Coherent (COHR.US), Credo Technology (CRDO.US), and Macom (MTSI) are also expected to significantly benefit from this unprecedented wave of AI.