In short: Passing mention — #3 on the same slide, at 21.2%/yr. No view.
In short: Subscriber view, passing: the fourth equipment name in the "sell the knives" list of suppliers that benefit regardless of which AI architecture wins.
13:22In this knife fight, you want to be the one selling the knives. Upstream semiconductor suppliers such as ASML, KLA, LAM Research, and Applied Materials, together with memory suppliers such as Micron and SK Hynix. They benefit regardless of whether the winner is Nvidia, a hyperscaler, an AI lab, or some architecture we haven't seen yet.
In short: The semiconductor-equipment leg — the rare name that is both a widely-held core position and an active add. Named in the five-stock AI-infrastructure cluster among top holdings, and a top-five buy at three funds (with MU and AMD). App Economy's summary of where the new money went: "Taiwan Semiconductor, memory, storage, semiconductor equipment, and newer infrastructure names like Cerebras and Nebius featured prominently among top buys."
In short: Same pattern, bigger prior move: −6% on the week against +97% year to date, after a 24% bounce from late July into the first week of August. "The easy money on the AI technical rebound from oversold levels from July 29th due to the forced sale by situational awareness is probably over."
Full passage: premium transcript (PDF).
In short: Tool bottleneck — good problem, priced-in stock. Q3 revenue +25% Y/Y to a record $9.1B ($0.1B beat), adjusted EPS +41% to $3.50 ($0.11 beat); Semiconductor Systems +30% to $7.0B and a record 34% non-GAAP operating margin. DRAM reached 26% of Semi Systems revenue as memory makers race to expand HBM supply, and advanced packaging is now expected to grow more than 70% this year. Customers provide eight-quarter forecasts and "are pushing Applied to deliver equipment faster" — it has nearly doubled manufacturing space and plans to double quarterly system output by 2028. The calendar-2026 Semi Systems outlook was raised again with another strong 2027 expected; Q4 guided to $10.25B vs $9.56B consensus and EPS ~$4.02 vs $3.69. The stock still slipped after nearly doubling this year. Bottom Line: "demand is getting stronger… but high expectations are now baked into the stock."
Applied Materials doesn't make chips — it makes the machines that make chips. When memory manufacturers race to build more HBM (the high-speed memory that sits next to AI accelerators), they buy Applied's equipment first. This quarter revenue hit a record $9.1 billion, up 25%, with a record 34% operating margin, and DRAM memory now accounts for 26% of its semiconductor-systems sales.
The striking detail is the shape of the constraint. Customers give Applied eight quarters of forward forecasts and are "pushing Applied to deliver equipment faster" — the company has nearly doubled its factory space and plans to double how many systems it ships per quarter by 2028. In other words the bottleneck has moved from demand to Applied's own ability to build.
So why did the stock slip on a record quarter with guidance far above expectations? Because it had nearly doubled this year already. That is the caveat App Economy attaches to the positive read: the business is getting better, but the good news is already in the price, so the stock can be right and still not go up.
In short: #7. "Applied Materials is the global leader in semiconductor equipment and engineering software. They provide the highly specialized manufacturing systems, machines, and materials used to produce nearly every new computer chip and advanced display in the world. This American company operates at the absolute ground floor of global technology." Durability: "Microchips are the foundation of the future; they supply the machinery to all chipmakers; atomic-scale engineering cannot be easily copied." The supplier-to-everyone framing — sell to all the chipmakers rather than picking one — is the same logic Thermo Fisher gets for biotech.
Applied Materials makes the machines that deposit, etch and shape the layers of material on a silicon wafer — everything, roughly speaking, other than the lithography step that ASML dominates. Almost every chip made anywhere passes through its equipment.
The attraction is that it does not have to pick a winner. Whichever chipmaker gains share, the equipment gets bought, so the position is a claim on total chip manufacturing rather than on any one manufacturer. The engineering is at atomic scale and takes decades to replicate, which is the barrier.
Worth noting the cyclicality this argument glosses over: semiconductor equipment orders swing violently with the capital-spending cycle, and a twenty-year hold means living through several of those swings without selling.
In short: Another of Burry's newly disclosed semiconductor shorts (with NVDA/TSLA/CAT); down ~7% in the memory selloff.
Full passage: premium transcript (PDF).
In short: Semi-equipment is "working" — one of his technology 52-week-high names, and a derivative off the memory boom (with KLA and Lam) to capture alpha after the parabolic moves in memory.
Applied Materials is one of the big "semicap" companies — it sells the machines chipmakers use to build chips. Terranova likes it for two overlapping reasons: it's on the 52-week-high list (so it's already a proven leader the market is rewarding), and it's a "derivative off memory" — as the memory boom forces chipmakers to add capacity, they have to buy more of Applied's equipment. Owning the toolmaker is a steadier way to ride the memory wave than betting on any single chip.
In short: Brown: semiconductor-equipment AI-buildout winner among "our stocks today."
In short: One of the big five (70%+ of all wafer-fab equipment); does the "put stuff on / take stuff off the wafer" steps. "They're all doing good… if it's working, they will all work to greater or lesser degree."
Applied Materials is the biggest and broadest of the chip-equipment makers — like Lam, it handles the "put material on the wafer / take material off" steps, across the widest range of tools. Chips are built like a layer cake: 30–50 layers of microscopic wiring built up by repeating deposit-pattern-etch-inspect cycles, and Applied sells machines for much of that cake.
Rasgon's stance on the whole equipment group is simple: when AI forces everyone — logic, memory, foundries — to add capacity, all the toolmakers win "to greater or lesser degree." They're all up big; he covers AMAT, Lam and KLA and is positive on the basket.
45:19And so applied materials and lamb research and Tokyo Electron primarily do the put stuff on the wafer and take stuff off the wafer steps. ASML does that patterning step. It's known as lithography. It's the most critical step especially for the advanced semiconductors because — mean for the GPUs. Well, the GPUs and even the CPUs and everything else because the the most advanced uh chips have the smallest features, right? And it's that patterning step, that lithography step that defines how small of a feature you can print on the wafer.
Nothing matches this filter.
Verbatim excerpts from the public transcripts (auto-pulled at each mention's timestamp, lightly cleaned). Timestamps link into the video; "source page" opens that commentator's full analysis at this row. Click a mention's header line to expand it (one open at a time). For personal study — not investment advice.