SEMIFIVE, a provider of custom AI semiconductor (ASIC) solutions, reported bookings of KRW 118.9 billion and consolidated revenue of KRW 94.7 billion for the first half of 2026. In just six months, the company reached 71% of its total 2025 bookings and 78% of its full-year 2025 revenue, pointing to sustained growth momentum.
A key theme in the results was balanced growth across SEMIFIVE's three core business lines: ASIC turnkey design, mass production, and IP licensing. Growth in ASIC turnkey bookings with strong visibility into eventual mass production, continued purchase orders backed by exclusive production rights tied to SEMIFIVE's mask sets (the templates used to physically manufacture a chip), and recurring revenue from low-power IP licensing to a growing base of Big Tech and data center customers all contributed to the company's performance.
On the ASIC development side, revenue reached KRW 54.1 billion in the first half, more than doubling year over year. SEMIFIVE attributes this to its long-term strategy of building a turnkey ASIC business explicitly designed with mass production in mind from the start. Traditional design services, and even most turnkey models, typically only get involved after a fabless customer has already completed the front-end design work, with the service provider handling back-end implementation and final delivery. SEMIFIVE's approach differs in that a growing number of OEMs and service providers, companies that historically bought off-the-shelf chips, are now looking to develop custom silicon tailored to their own products, but many lack the in-house design teams needed to manage the full chip development process themselves. Since its founding, SEMIFIVE has built an end-to-end service covering chip specification, IP selection, logic and physical design, packaging, testing, and software development, which has let it expand beyond traditional semiconductor customers to a broader set of businesses developing their own custom chips. Because these OEM and service-provider customers are often the actual end users of the chips, SEMIFIVE gets strong early visibility into expected production volumes, and the company expects its growing ASIC turnkey pipeline to become an increasingly important driver of stable mass-production revenue going forward.
On the mass production side, bookings reached KRW 42.3 billion in the first half, nearly double the KRW 21.2 billion booked for all of 2025. Quarterly bookings grew roughly 71%, from KRW 15.6 billion in the first quarter to KRW 26.7 billion in the second. Overseas customers made up about 45% (KRW 12.1 billion) of second-quarter bookings, suggesting SEMIFIVE's international production pipeline is gaining traction. The mass production business generates stable, recurring revenue throughout a customer's product lifecycle, supported by SEMIFIVE's exclusive ownership of the chip masks involved. As customers increasingly move into mass production on faster timelines, the company expects its secured production roadmaps to provide a solid foundation for long-term growth.
On the IP business, led by subsidiary Analog Bits, first-half revenue reached KRW 32.5 billion, already surpassing all of 2025's revenue of KRW 30.5 billion. Bookings reached KRW 32.1 billion, equal to about 77.3% of full-year 2025 bookings. This growth comes as power efficiency and thermal management become increasingly important competitive factors for AI chips, driving demand for low-power mixed-signal IP, a core building block in high-performance AI ASICs. Analog Bits has built what SEMIFIVE describes as a self-reinforcing cycle around custom IP development: when a major tech customer requests IP tailored to its own data center needs, Analog Bits develops and silicon-validates that IP, and once proven, it gets added to Analog Bits' broader portfolio, where it can then be licensed to other customers as an off-the-shelf product without further development work. By licensing these already-proven IP products to a wider base of data center customers, Analog Bits has quickly built up recurring licensing revenue. Revenue from advanced-node IP at 2nm and 3nm has also continued growing, supported by the company's ongoing investment in newer process technologies.
Alongside this revenue growth, SEMIFIVE also reported a meaningful improvement in profitability. Gross margin rose 18.7 percentage points year over year, from 11.9% to 30.6% in the first half of 2026, while operating margin improved by 47.0 percentage points to -11.5%, substantially narrowing the company's operating losses.
SEMIFIVE says its mass production business is now entering a full-scale ramp-up phase, supported by continued follow-on orders for vision AI, on-device AI, and data center AI chips. At the same time, the company is expanding its pipeline of new ASIC development projects, with growing demand from customers across North America, Europe, and Asia for high-performance AI semiconductor projects built on 3D-IC technology.
Brandon Cho, CEO and co-founder of SEMIFIVE, said the first-half results show that the company's scalable business model, spanning ASIC turnkey, mass production, and IP licensing, has delivered tangible results. He said that as backlog and production volumes continue converting into revenue, alongside an expanding pipeline of new ASIC development opportunities, the company expects its growth momentum to strengthen further in the second half of the year.
