Custom ASICs outpacing NVIDIA GPU growth in 2026 per TrendForce — Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta diverting procurement to internal designs
TrendForce projects 44.6% custom-ASIC growth versus 16.1% merchant-GPU growth in 2026 — the structural inversion where customer-designed silicon outpaces merchant-channel growth on a percentage basis. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are diverting procurement to internal designs at meaningful scale, and Anthropic is moving toward its own chips for Claude. NVIDIA still holds 70-80% of AI accelerator market by revenue, with Blackwell and upcoming Vera Rubin ahead on raw performance.
The growth-rate inversion is the substantive piece. Through 2023-2025 merchant-channel GPU sales — primarily NVIDIA — drove total AI-silicon market growth, with custom ASICs growing in absolute terms but slower on a percentage basis. The TrendForce 2026 projection inverts that pattern: custom ASICs at 44.6% growth, merchant GPUs at 16.1% growth, with the gap reflecting that the largest hyperscalers are deploying meaningful capacity on internal-design silicon (Google TPU lineup, AWS Trainium 2 and Inferentia 3, Microsoft Maia accelerators, Meta's internal silicon) for workloads previously dominated by NVIDIA. The 44.6% custom-ASIC growth rate is the highest single-category growth rate any segment of AI silicon has produced.
The competitive context is the absolute-share-versus-percentage-growth dynamic. NVIDIA's 70-80% share of AI accelerator market by revenue remains dominant; Blackwell-plus-Vera-Rubin remains ahead on raw performance against the custom-ASIC alternatives. The percentage-growth advantage for custom ASICs reflects share-shift at the margins rather than wholesale displacement. Anthropic moving toward its own AI chips for Claude is the most significant signal that NVIDIA's largest non-hyperscaler customers are also planning to escape NVIDIA dependence — extending the custom-ASIC trajectory from the hyperscaler tier into the frontier-lab tier. BofA's $1.3T 2026 chip-market forecast embeds the multi-stack-driven growth as the operative model for the year.
TrendForce — Custom ASIC vs merchant GPU 2026 growth projection → · Reuters — Hyperscaler custom silicon diversion 2026 → · TechCrunch — AI chip market custom ASIC trajectory 2026 →