The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) reports March 2026 chip sales hit $99.5B — up 79.2% YoY. Q1 totaled $298.5B. The industry is on track for the first $1T year in semiconductor history, ~2 years ahead of the most aggressive 2024 forecasts. The number matters less than the shape of the curve. For 40 years, semis were textbook cyclical: 18–24 month up-cycles (PCs, mobile, cloud), then 12–18 month corrections. Investors learned to underwrite the cycle, not the trend. The 2024–2026 data shows the cycle didn't correct. It accelerated. March's +79% follows a +28% comp in March 2025 — this isn't a base-effect bounce. One end-market explains nearly all of it: AI infrastructure. HBM is sold out through 2027. The constraint is no longer demand — it's fab capacity, packaging, and power. For VC, the takeaway isn't about chip companies themselves. It's that the cost of running AI — training and inference — is falling faster than any prior compute shift, because the underlying chip supply is compounding at 70%+ annually. That cost decline flows downstream to every company building on top of it. In the cloud era, infrastructure costs flattened within a few years; here, they're still dropping. Anything built on this base inherits that. The first trillion-dollar year isn't the story. The story is that it no longer looks cyclical. interplay.vc/blog/the-chip-i…