When silver investors talk about industrial demand, the conversation almost always goes to solar panels. That’s understandable — solar is large, fast-growing, and straightforward to understand. But there’s a parallel industrial demand story that gets far less attention, involves silver in ways most people don’t realize, and is accelerating due to one of the biggest technology shifts of the past decade: the explosion in artificial intelligence.
Silver runs through virtually every semiconductor ever made. Not in the quantities it appears in a solar panel, and not in ways that are obvious to the naked eye — but reliably, structurally, and at a scale that, when you add it up across the entire global semiconductor industry, represents a significant and growing demand stream.
Where Silver Actually Appears in Chips
Before getting to the AI angle, it’s worth being specific about where silver shows up in semiconductor manufacturing and electronics assembly, because the details matter.
Die Attach
When a silicon die (the actual chip) is mounted onto a substrate or lead frame, it needs to be bonded securely and the heat it generates needs to be conducted away efficiently. Silver-based die attach materials — silver-filled epoxies and silver sinter pastes — are widely used for this purpose. Silver’s thermal and electrical conductivity make it well-suited for this role. In high-performance and high-power applications (power semiconductors, RF chips, automotive electronics), sintered silver die attach has become the preferred solution because it conducts heat far better than alternatives.
Multilayer Ceramic Capacitors (MLCCs)
This is the most significant and least-discussed silver application in electronics. Multilayer ceramic capacitors are tiny passive components used to store and filter electrical charge. They are everywhere — a modern smartphone contains 1,000 or more MLCCs. A modern electric vehicle contains 10,000 or more. A single server board can contain hundreds.
Inside an MLCC, alternating layers of ceramic dielectric and metallic electrode are stacked together. Silver-palladium (Ag-Pd) alloys are the dominant electrode material for MLCCs used in applications requiring high reliability — automotive systems, medical devices, industrial equipment, aerospace. As electronics have become more complex and as automotive electrification has driven demand for high-reliability components, silver-palladium MLCC demand has grown significantly.
Electrical Contacts and Connectors
Silver has the highest electrical conductivity of any element, and it’s used extensively in the contacts and connectors that form electrical connections throughout a circuit board and between components. Silver-plated contacts, silver-bearing solders, and silver-filled conductive adhesives appear throughout the signal chain in high-performance electronics.
PCB Finishes
Printed circuit boards (PCBs) require a surface finish on their copper pads to protect them from oxidation before and after component soldering. Immersion silver (IAg) is one of the most commonly used surface finishes — a thin layer of silver is deposited on the copper pads, providing excellent solderability, good electrical contact, and a flat surface for fine-pitch components. As PCBs have become more complex and component pitches have tightened, immersion silver has gained share over older finishes.
The AI Demand Acceleration
The above applications have existed for decades. What’s changed — and why the semiconductor silver story deserves fresh attention — is the scale and pace of AI-driven demand for high-performance computing hardware.
Training large AI models requires enormous numbers of specialized chips running for extended periods. The leading AI accelerators — GPU clusters, custom ASICs, and the infrastructure around them — are being built and deployed at a pace the semiconductor industry has never previously experienced. Data center construction is accelerating globally, driven by hyperscalers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta) and a new wave of AI-focused startups.
Each of those GPU servers contains hundreds of dollars of silver-bearing components. Multiply across millions of units, and the numbers become significant.
But the more interesting dynamic is at the chip packaging level.
Advanced Packaging: More Silver Per Unit of Compute
Moore’s Law — the observation that transistor density on a chip roughly doubles every two years — is slowing. The physics of silicon transistor scaling are approaching fundamental limits. But the demand for more compute per watt and per dollar continues unabated.
The semiconductor industry’s answer to the slowdown in transistor scaling is advanced packaging: instead of cramming more transistors onto a single monolithic chip, designers are disaggregating chips into multiple smaller dies (called “chiplets”) and connecting them together in sophisticated 2.5D and 3D configurations. NVIDIA’s high-end AI GPUs, Intel’s recent processor generations, and AMD’s EPYC server chips all use chiplet architectures.
Here’s the silver angle: advanced packaging uses more silver-bearing materials per unit of compute than traditional monolithic chip packaging. Chiplet architectures require:
- More die-to-die interconnects, often using silver-bearing solder or conductive bumps
- More complex substrate designs with more silver-containing layers
- Silver sintering in power module assembly for the high-power components required to feed energy-hungry AI accelerators
- More MLCCs per board to manage power delivery to complex multi-die packages
As advanced packaging becomes the dominant approach for high-performance chips — which it is clearly doing — the silver intensity of the chip ecosystem increases, even if the silver content per individual die were to remain flat.
The MLCC Demand Surge
Of all the semiconductor-adjacent silver demand stories, MLCCs deserve particular attention because of their breadth and growth.
The automotive electrification trend is a major driver. Conventional internal combustion engine vehicles contain roughly 3,000–4,000 MLCCs. Battery electric vehicles contain upwards of 10,000, with many high-end EVs approaching 18,000. This is because EVs have vastly more sophisticated power electronics — inverters, battery management systems, on-board chargers, motor controllers — each of which requires large numbers of high-reliability capacitors. Those capacitors, in automotive applications, are almost universally silver-palladium electrode MLCCs.
Simultaneously, the proliferation of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and the equipment required for autonomous vehicle development is adding MLCC content to vehicles even before full electrification. Radar systems, cameras, lidar units, and the processing hardware to integrate their data all add capacitor demand.
Then layer on top: 5G infrastructure. Each 5G base station contains significantly more MLCCs than a 4G equivalent, partly because 5G operates at higher frequencies that require more sophisticated filtering and signal management, and partly because 5G base station architectures are more distributed. The global rollout of 5G infrastructure represents a multi-year incremental MLCC demand source.
Sizing the Opportunity — and Its Limits
How large is semiconductor and electronics silver demand in total? The Silver Institute reports this primarily under the category of “electrical and electronics” demand, which has historically represented roughly 20–25% of total industrial silver demand — typically in the range of 150–200 million troy ounces per year, making it comparable in scale to the solar sector.
Unlike solar, semiconductor silver demand doesn’t scale linearly with one easily measurable variable (installed watt-capacity). It’s diffuse — spread across chip packaging, MLCCs, PCB finishes, contacts, and connectors across the entire electronics industry — which makes it harder to project but also less vulnerable to the single-point substitution risk that solar silver demand faces (the ongoing effort to reduce silver loading per panel).
Silver substitution in semiconductor applications is difficult for different reasons than in solar. In MLCCs, silver-palladium is chosen for reliability, not just conductivity — automotive-grade capacitors need to survive temperature cycling, vibration, and decades of use. Substituting base metals introduces reliability risks that high-value applications won’t accept. In die attach sintering, silver’s thermal conductivity is essential for managing heat in high-power chips; alternatives simply don’t perform as well.
What This Means for the Silver Demand Picture
The semiconductor silver story reinforces a theme that runs across silver’s industrial demand profile: silver is increasingly critical infrastructure for the technologies the world is building.
Solar panels. Electric vehicles. 5G networks. AI data centers. Medical devices. These are not peripheral applications that might be engineered away — they are the core technologies of the next several decades, and silver is embedded in all of them. The electronics and semiconductor category is the quiet one in that list, generating fewer headlines than solar and less investor discussion than EVs, but running deeper and wider through the electronics ecosystem than either.
The AI investment cycle in particular is unusual in that its pace is driven by competitive dynamics among the world’s largest technology companies, not by policy mandates or consumer purchasing decisions. When Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and a thousand AI startups are simultaneously racing to build compute infrastructure, the associated demand for silver-bearing components doesn’t respond to price signals the way ordinary consumer demand does. It’s driven by competitive necessity.
The Bottom Line
Every smartphone, every server, every electric vehicle, every 5G base station contains silver in forms that are invisible to the naked eye but essential to function. As AI accelerates the buildout of global computing infrastructure, and as advanced chip packaging architectures increase the silver intensity of each unit of compute, the semiconductor and electronics sector represents a structural and growing demand stream for silver.
It’s not as easy to model as solar. It doesn’t generate the same headlines. But it’s arguably more durable — because the applications it serves are so diverse, so technically demanding, and so deeply integrated into the technologies that define modern infrastructure.
Sources
[1] The Silver Institute / Metals Focus, World Silver Survey (annual) — electrical and electronics demand data. silverinstitute.org
[2] SEMI (Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International), industry data on chip packaging trends and advanced packaging adoption. semi.org
[3] TDK Corporation and Murata Manufacturing, technical documentation on MLCC construction and silver-palladium electrode materials. Available at respective investor relations and technical resources pages.
[4] U.S. Geological Survey, “Mineral Commodity Summaries: Silver” (annual) — industrial end-use breakdown. usgs.gov
[5] International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (iNEMI), roadmaps on PCB surface finishes and assembly materials. inemi.org
[6] McKinsey Global Institute and various semiconductor industry analyses on AI-driven data center demand. (Multiple sources; check current publications from SEMI, Gartner, and IDC for updated figures.)