Despite political and national security concerns about U.S. domestic semiconductor production, American companies continue to account for more than half of the global chip industry’s total spending on research and development, according to the latest annual analysis of R&D expenditures by IC Insights.  About 56% of worldwide semiconductor industry R&D spending in 2021 was by companies headquartered in the Americas region—essentially all of them in the U.S. and a large chunk of that coming from Intel (19%, or $15.2 billion last year), says IC Insights’ analysis of research and development trends published in its most recent quarterly update of the 2022 McClean Report service.

Figure 1 shows semiconductor R&D expenditures by Asian-Pacific companies—including wafer foundries, fabless chip suppliers, and integrated device manufacturers (IDMs)—exceeded 29% of the worldwide total in 2021, followed by those based in Europe at about 8%, and Japan at nearly 7% of industry spending.  Since 2011, the global share of semiconductor R&D expenditures held by chip suppliers based in the Americas grew slightly from nearly 55% and Asia-Pacific companies (including China) climbed from 18%.