The semiconductor industry is hotter than ever, growing more than 10% in 2020, despite a global pandemic and a global supply chain shortage, a recent IDC report found.

The global semiconductor market topped $464 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $522 billion in 2021, up 12.5%, according to IDC. This is despite ongoing supply chain and capacity issues, which have shuttered automotive assembly lines and extended infrastructure lead times by as much as a year.

“Overall, the semiconductor industry remains on track to deliver another strong year of growth as the super cycle that began at the end of 2019 strengthens this year,” IDC VP Mario Morales wrote.

IDC doesn’t expect this to change much in 2021 with shortages continuing to impact the automotive sector and other industries that rely on older technology nodes. “The industry will continue to struggle to rebalance across different industry segments, while investment in capacity now will improve the industry’s resiliency in a few years,” IDC analysts wrote in the report.

Samsung, TSMC, and Intel have collectively announced more than $130 billion in spending on new chip foundries, the latter opening its fabs to outside customers under the Intel Foundry Services division.

Intel, as part of this endeavor, recently announced a $20 billion plan to construct two new fabs in Arizona, and a $3.5 billion retrofit of its New Mexico plant. The chipmaker is currently in talks with European Union leaders about a third European-based foundry.

TSMC plans to spend more than $100 billion over the next few years to address capacity demand, with at least one foundry already under construction in Arizona.

A robust increase in consumer spending contributed to capacity shortages. IDC reports that changes in consumer buying behavior, the 5G roll out, and the move to remote work and education helped the market to rebound in 2020 from 2019’s 12.2% decline.

IDC expects these areas to continue to grow in 2021, driven by consumer, computing, 5G, and automotive semiconductor demand.

PC and server shipments saw the strongest growth in 2020, up 17.3% year over year to $160 billion. IDC now expects PC and server revenues to grow 7.7% to $173 billion in 2021. “Demand for PC processors remains strong, especially in value-oriented segments,” Shane Rau, VP of computing semiconductors at IDC, wrote. “The PC processors market looks strong through the first half and likely the whole year.”

Smartphone semiconductors also saw strong growth in 2020, up 9.1%, driven by the adoption of higher-priced 5G modems. Phil Solis, research director of connectivity and smartphone semiconductors at IDC, expects 2021 to be an inflection point for semiconductor vendors as 5G phones capture 34% of all mobile phone shipments. As such, IDC anticipates a 23% increase in smartphone chip revenues this year.

IDC also projects that consumer electronics and automotive semiconductors will grow 8.9% and 13.6% respectively in 2021.

High-performance computing (HPC) is another segment that has seen strong growth over the past year. HPC players grew between 10% and 20% during the past year, according to a recent Global Data report.

This has been driven, in part, by the availability of HPC services from the major cloud providers, including Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure.

“The growth trend in HPC is likely to continue in the next decade as companies are pouring research and development resources into technology,” Filipe Oliveira, senior analyst at GlobalData, wrote. “Oracle, IBM, HPE, Intel, and Microsoft were the top HPC patent assignees in the last decade. In 2020, the number of HPC patents granted was 713% higher than in 2010. A substantial chunk of this growth is happening in the cloud.”

The availability of these cloud services has lowered the barrier to entry for many businesses, which previously couldn’t have afforded the upfront investment of a supercomputing cluster, according to GlobalData.

Oliveira also sees growing opportunities for HPC at the edge where it might be used to power latency-sensitive workloads in retail, live entertainment, and gaming. “For example, using HPC at the edge when streaming live entertainment allows for editing with minimal latency,” he wrote.