The Rise & Fall of the Biggest Chipmakers (1970 - 2025)

Fifty-five years of the semiconductor industry, as a bar chart race. Texas Instruments led in 1970 with about $100 million a year. NEC took the crown in the mid-1980s, when Japan owned memory. Intel held it through the PC decade. Samsung passed Intel in 2017. By 2025 Nvidia sits on top at roughly $126 billion — more than a thousand times the leader of 1970. Along the way, giants disappear: Motorola, Hitachi, Fujitsu, National Semiconductor, Freescale, NEC, Toshiba. 20 companies · annual semiconductor revenue in US dollars · no narration. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Dawn of Transistors 0:35 Early Microprocessors 1:23 Memory Race Accelerates 2:13 Japan Takes The Lead 3:04 The DRAM Massacre 3:44 Foundries Are Born 4:40 Intel Builds A Monopoly 5:39 The Dot Com Bubble 6:26 Turn of The Millennium 7:14 Giants Merge And Fall 8:06 Mobile Chips Rise Up 9:00 Global Crash And Recovery 9:58 Smartphones Take Over 11:24 Memory Boom Explodes 12:35 Trade Wars Begin 13:27 Global Chip Shortage 14:56 AI Sparks A Gold Rush Figures are approximate and gathered for illustration, not for research use. PHOTO CREDITS — all via Wikimedia Commons, cropped and background removed: Jensen Huang — Prime Minister's Office (India), GODL-India https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Lee Jae-yong — KBS, CC BY 3.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Lip-Bu Tan — US Department of Commerce, public domain Lisa Su — The White House, public domain Music licensed via AudioHero.