Who Are the Top Semiconductor Companies in the U.S.?

Semiconductors have become such an integral feature of our network-immersed, hyper-connected society that there are now purported to be around 100 billion of them in active use—or nearly 19 for every single human being on earth. 

Given their growing criticality to dozens of global sectors—and range of increasingly consequential military and defense applications—it’s hardly surprising that the industry producing these devices is experiencing a rapid growth spurt. After reaching a record global revenue of well over $550 billion in 2021, the market is projected to experience a compound annual growth rate of somewhere between 6 and 8% over the latter half of the 2020s. By many accounts, it’s well-positioned to swell into a trillion-dollar industry by 2030. 

This influx of demand is also boosted by initiatives from the Biden administration, who passed the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022 to bolster America’s lagging domestic chip manufacturing. 

While the U.S. was once an indisputable powerhouse in chip manufacturing—in 1990, U.S. firms were fabricating 37% of the world’s semiconductors—America is currently making only around 12% of the total global output (and none of the most advanced chips). The deep-pocketed legislation, with its $53 billion in incentives for semiconductor firms building or expanding operations on American soil, has sparked a frenzy in private investments. Since 2022, around $200 billion in semiconductor-related projects have been announced. 

So which semiconductor companies are leading the way for the U.S.? We break down the top semiconductor companies in the U.S. by revenue below: 

Intel

Revenue: $54 billion (2023)

Size: 125,000 employees

Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA

U.S. Fabs: 12

Production Node Range: 7-65 nm 

Founded in 1968 as a manufacturer of logic circuits and memory chips, Intel has spent the past half-century growing into one of the largest semiconductor firms in the world. The company, which has well over 100,000 employees and locations in 65 countries, produces a wide array of chips, including graphics processing units (GPUs), systems-on-a-chip (SOC), and flash memory. Intel’s line of central processing units (CPUs), all under the umbrella of the company’s flagship Intel Core family, are used by Dell, Lenovo, and HP, among other large-scale customers. 

In March, Intel was awarded a total of $8.5 billion in subsidies—and another $11 billion in loans—through the CHIPS Act. The firm plans to put the substantial injection of funding toward the construction of two new fabs on its Arizona campus and another two in Ohio, where the company will attempt to launch an entirely new manufacturing hub with no preexisting semiconductor ecosystem. All four of the new fabs announced will manufacture leading-edge nodes. 

Broadcom Inc. 

Revenue: $36 billion (2023)

Size: 20,000 employees

Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA

U.S. Fabs: Fabless

Production Node Range: N/A

A multinational corporation headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley, Broadcom primarily operates as a fabless designer with a broad and diversified range of semiconductor products. The company’s portfolio includes ethernet switch ICs, network adapters, RAID controllers, and other devices that are used by high-profile customers like IBM, Dell, Motorola, and Nintendo. In 2023, Broadcom finalized a multibillion dollar deal with Apple—for whom it has been a longstanding supplier—to provide 5G radio frequency components, film bulk acoustic resonator filters, and wireless connectivity parts for the company’s devices. 

Broadcom has also recently worked to establish itself as a major supplier of custom chips, also referred to as ASICs. The firm has secured large-scale agreements to provide Google and Meta with these customized integrated circuits, and financial analysts believe both deals could drive the company’s ASIC chip revenue north of $9 billion in 2024. 

Nvidia

Revenue: $27 billion (2023)

Size: 26,000 employees

Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA

U.S. Fabs: Fabless

Production Node Range: N/A

Nvidia’s stratospheric upward trajectory in the semiconductor world has been spectacular to witness. The company has grown so fast its 2023 revenue is already largely outdated. The chipmaker’s most recent quarterly revenue topped a stunning $22 billion—a 265% leap from just a year earlier—and some analysts believe it has a legitimate chance at becoming the U.S.’s most valuable company. 

Nvidia’s GPUs are powerful processors ideal for generative AI, large language models (LLM), and machine learning, and tens of thousands of companies employing advanced computing and AI solutions are already using the leading-edge chips. Because the company employs a fabless business model that outsources chip manufacturing to other firms, Nvidia will likely not be a major beneficiary of the CHIPS Act. The world-leading chip designer is, however, collaborating closely with the U.S. government to ensure that future semiconductors produced for Chinese companies comply with existing export controls. 

Applied Materials

Revenue: $26.5 billion (2023)

Size: 34,000 employees

Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA

U.S. Fabs: N/A

Production Node Range: N/A

As one of the world’s leading suppliers of manufacturing equipment, services, and software for the semiconductor industry, Applied Materials plays a crucial role in the global chipmaking ecosystem. The company counts Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Intel, and Samsung among its chief customers, and its deep repertoire of process technology products is used to fabricate many of the most cutting-edge chips powering electronics, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and cloud computing. In addition to its essential role in the semiconductor supply chain, the firm also manufactures equipment and systems used to produce flat panel displays for televisions, computers, and smartphones.

Last year, Applied Materials came under criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department. The company had allegedly violated export controls by shipping hundreds of millions of dollars of fabrication equipment to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC). The partially state-owned company, which is China’s largest chipmaker, has been the target of U.S. export controls dating back to 2022, when the Bureau of Industry and Security first announced a bevy of new restrictions limiting China’s ability to obtain crucial semiconductor technology. Those controls were subsequently updated in 2023, with new and expanded rules reflecting BIS efforts to close loopholes, foreclose circumvention strategies, and further constrain the shipment of high-level manufacturing equipment to Chinese companies. Applied Materials is under scrutiny for multiple shipments made to a SMIC subsidiary in South Korea in 2021 and 2022, after the Chinese firm had already been added to the U.S. Commerce Department’s Entity List. 

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)

Revenue: $23 billion (2023)

Size: 26,000 employees

Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA

U.S. Fabs: Fabless

Production Node Range: N/A

Originally a chipmaker specializing in microprocessors, graphics processing units (GPUs), and other semiconductor devices, AMD spun off its manufacturing arm in 2009, resulting in the creation of New York-based GlobalFoundries. Today, AMD is a fabless firm that outsources all its manufacturing processes to external companies. This production strategy allows the company to focus exclusively on chip design. 

In 2016, AMD introduced Ryzen, a new family of topline microprocessors incorporating radically redesigned chip architecture. The high-end CPUs have helped AMD reclaim territory lost to Intel’s market-dominating Core processors. More recently, the company officially entered the burgeoning and intensely competitive market for AI chips with the release of its MI300X line of GPUs. The firm’s new accelerators—which feature over 150 billion transistors and advanced 3D packaging—are expected to directly compete with Nvidia’s industry-leading processors in the race to court customers looking to power large language models and generative AI platforms. 

Texas Instruments 

Revenue: $17.5 billion (2023)

Size: 34,000 employees

Headquarters: Dallas, TX

U.S. Fabs: 8

Production Node Range: 45-350 nm 

A veritable household name to an extent not usually associated with the historically low-profile semiconductor industry, Texas Instruments boasts an illustrious array of technological milestones. In 1954, the company produced the first commercial silicon transistor. Just a few years later, an engineer working at its Central Research Labs in Dallas played an instrumental role in inventing the integrated circuit. Today, TI posseses a vast portfolio of over 80,000 semiconductor devices and electronic components, including amplifiers, microcontrollers, and memory chips. While TI has tens of thousands of customers all over the world, its principal partnerships are with Cisco Systems, Dell, HP, and Apple. 

After declaring that it would be investing a total of $11 billion to ramp up production capacity at its facilities in Utah, the company last year broke ground on a new 300-mm fabrication plant near Salt Lake City. TI is also constructing an additional four new fabs at its existing campus in Sherman, Texas. While no federal grants for the company have yet been announced, TI anticipates that its suite of projects aimed at expanding manufacturing operations in the U.S. will eventually win financial support from the CHIPS Act. 

Titans in a Shifting Semiconductor Landscape 

For all the hand-wringing about the decline of America’s primacy in the global semiconductor industry, the U.S. continues to enjoy a larger market share of the sector than any other country. But companies like Nvidia and AMD have embraced the fabless business model, and a growing roster of firms are outsourcing manufacturing to foundries in Taiwan, Korea, and other East Asian nations. The result is that the U.S. has arrived at a complicated state of affairs—one in which it’s solidified its industry dominance while also multiplying its supply chain dependencies. 

As the pandemic cogently demonstrated, America’s largest chipmakers—multibillion-dollar firms that employ thousands and serve as critical cogs for myriad industries—are highly vulnerable to overseas chokepoints, supply shocks, and fab shutdowns. Adding to these risk factors is the specter of geopolitical uncertainty in Asia—including China’s opaque and potentially insidious designs in the region. Taken as a whole, these susceptibilities provide ample justification for the U.S. to engineer a more independent and resilient semiconductor supply chain anchored in domestic manufacturing. But while the industry has grown more multilateral and exceedingly reliant on a delicate thicket of interdependencies, America’s largest semiconductor firms have continued to assert themselves as preeminent players and trailblazing agents in the sector. Few, if any, appear willing to cede territory—or lose out on any of the new opportunities materializing out of the current generational boom—anytime soon.