AI Servers Lead 2025 Electronics Market as Smartphones, Wearables, and TVs Stagnate, TrendForce Reports

TrendForce released a report detailing the global electronics market's outlook for 2025 and 2026. The analysis highlights a divided market in 2025, with AI server demand, driven by data center consumption, as the primary growth driver. In contrast, consumer electronics such as smartphones, notebooks, wearables, and TVs are expected to stagnate due to high inflation, limited innovation, and geopolitical uncertainties. TrendForce projects a further slowdown in industry growth in 2026, marking a shift to a low-growth consolidation phase.

To counter potential U.S. tariff barriers and geopolitical risks, and leveraging China’s first-half subsidy policies, sectors including servers, tablets, monitors, and automobiles will see significant order front-loading in 2025. This shift moves shipments from the traditional second-half peak to the first half, creating an even 50:50 split between the two periods. While this boosts first-half revenue, it raises concerns for Q4, as reduced order momentum could result in high channel inventories.

AI server shipments are projected to grow by over 20% year-on-year in 2025, fueled by cloud service providers’ investments in NVIDIA’s high-end GPUs and custom ASIC chips. However, this focus is compressing budgets for general-purpose servers. Meanwhile, edge AI in consumer devices has lost momentum, with most AI integrat...