Under the backdrop of geopolitical tensions, the supply of wafer fabrication plants in the Middle East has also been affected, which has led to a shift in global orders. 

According to Taiwan's Economic Daily, recently, World Advanced (VIS) has seen a significant increase in orders for its mature processes, making it one of the alternative solutions in the context of wafer supply disruptions in the Middle East; PSMC also stated that its order volume has significantly rebounded and is closely monitoring market changes. 

Behind this, the shipment of Israel's largest and the world's top ten foundry, Tower Semiconductor, has been disrupted. Its downstream customers have already initiated the process of transferring orders. According to the information, the company mainly focuses on high-voltage and special mature processes, covering products such as power management ICs, power components, CIS sensors, RF, MEMS and analog signal ICs. Its technical structure is similar to that of world-leading companies like United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) and LITEON. 

It is worth noting that the customers of Gaotai Semiconductor include power semiconductor giants such as ON Semiconductor and Vishay, as well as major companies like Intel, Samsung, Broadcom, and Skyworks. Just last month, Gaotai Semiconductor announced that it would collaborate with NVIDIA, using high-performance silicon photonics technology to support 1.6T data center optical modules for the next-generation AI infrastructure. 

The report indicates that due to the acceleration of capacity transfer caused by the US-Iran conflict, buyers are willing to pay premiums to ensure supply, pushing up the prices of mature process nodes, or triggering a new round of price hikes for mature process outsourcing. Industry analysts suggest that the US-Iran conflict will lead to actions to de-risk the supply chain, and downstream customers will accelerate the search for alternative production capacity. Moreover, since transfer orders often come with time cost premiums, to ensure uninterrupted supply, customers are expected to lock in production capacity at higher prices, forming a price upward push force. 

From the demand side, the price increase trend of mature processes may be persistent. Orient Securities believes that due to the increased demand brought by AI server power ICs, as well as the domestic IC localization trend leading to an increase in the demand for local wafer foundries' BCD/PMIC, the utilization rate of eight-inch production capacity of some wafer factories has significantly improved since the middle of 2025. 

In terms of investment, Shenwan Hongyuan Securities stated that domestic wafer factories are continuing to make significant progress in mature production processes. Additionally, they have benefited from the recovery of the domestic demand market, resulting in higher utilization rates than the industry average. In the future, domestic wafer factories are expected to occupy a larger share among China's local IC design suppliers. By 2026, they are likely to account for more than three-quarters of the new production capacity in mature production processes globally. We recommend focusing on: overseas IDM's localized production; differentiated competition based on the substitution of specialized processes in chip design; and the demand for supporting logic wafer chips for 3D architecture storage.