Advantest: AI demand will help chip test equipment recover next year

According to Reuters, Japan's Advantest said that the use of high-end semiconductors in generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications will drive the recovery of the demand for chip testers.

Teradyne (Teradyne), a competitor of Advantest and the leading manufacturer in the field of chip testing equipment in the United States, said that the market is expected to shrink this year because customers hold excess inventory.

Advantest's operating profit from April to June this year dropped 68% to 14.3 billion yen (about 101.8 million dollars), which emphasized the weakness of the smartphone market and the slowdown of data center investment, but it is expected to recover next year.

Yoshiaki Yoshida, CEO of Advantest, said at the financial report conference: "Although there has been a decline this year, I believe that we will eventually face a growth curve."

In April of this year, Yasuo Mihashi, the co chief strategic officer of Advantest, said in an interview that the global competition to develop a powerful computing cluster and the next generation of artificial intelligence training system is prompting chip manufacturers to buy more testing equipment.

According to Bloomberg data, the surge in AI is driving the increase in orders from Nvidia and AMD, which provide key AI training semiconductors and rely on Advantest Testing as the main test equipment supplier.

Even without China, the demand for data center GPUs and testers will definitely grow rapidly. The world is investing heavily, "said Mitsuhiro Osawa, an analyst at Ichiyoshi Research Institute

Bloomberg analyst Masahiro Wakasugi stated that the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence is breaking through the limits of chip miniaturization and advanced packaging, increasing the likelihood of defects in the manufacturing process. This increases the demand for chip testers structurally to help manufacturers ensure performance and quality

Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Toyo Securities, said that the global revenue of high-performance GPU chip testers may surpass that of smartphone chip testers within a few years. Server chips will become larger and more complex, requiring more time for testing. The only solution for chip manufacturers is to purchase more tools to test more chips simultaneously