ShowDaily Day2 - Flipbook - Page 1
October 14,
SHOW DAILY
sponsored by
sponsored by
2026
Wednesday
McKinsey’s Wiseman: AI Demand Is Exponential,
but the Industry Still Builds Linearly
The semiconductor industry has two
problems to solve if it wants to keep
pace with AI, Bill Wiseman, senior
partner at McKinsey & Company,
told the SEMI Market Symposium
at SEMICON West on Monday.
“One is that we’ve got to get better
control over the power it takes
to process tokens,” he said. “And
the second thing is we’re just not
building fast enough.”
Wiseman, who leads McKinsey’s
global semiconductor practice, titled
his talk “Beyond Moore’s Law to
win the race for AI inference.” His
argument: demand for AI compute
is growing exponentially, while
nearly every way the industry adds
capacity grows linearly. “Demand’s
on an exponential,” he said.
“Everything that we have built in
this industry is all linear.”
Inference and the
new Moore’s Law
Inference already accounts for
roughly 60% to 70% of the tokens
processed in an AI data center,
Wiseman said, and agentic AI is
making each request far heavier.
Citing NVIDIA data, he showed
agentic workloads running about
100 times more compute-intensive
than chat: median input sequence
length rises from about 1,000 tokens
to 142,000, the key-value cache
grows from 4,000 to 1 million, the
number of turns climbs from three
to 65, and a single task may call
four sub-agents.
Costs are falling fast but not yet
Continued on page 3
fast enough. The
SEMI Builds a Global Home for
Advanced Packaging
Advanced packaging has a bigger place at SEMICON
West than ever, with three days of packaging content
on this year’s program, and SEMI is building a global
home for the topic through its Advanced Packaging and
Heterogeneous Integration (APHI) technology coalition.
“We’ve never had this much, and it shows how we’re
evolving with the industry,” Joe Stockunas, president
of SEMI Americas, said at Monday’s SEMICON West
press conference.
Beth Keser, who joined SEMI about five weeks ago
as vice president of technology coalitions, is leading
the effort. Keser has worked in advanced packaging for
more than 30 years at Motorola, Qualcomm, Intel and
two startups, most recently a photonics startup in San
Francisco. She spent 10 years on the IEEE Electronics
Packaging Society board of governors, Continued on page 6
Investing in American manufacturing, service and innovation.
