Advanced Packaging & Test (OSAT)

KLA Corporation is benefiting from accelerating artificial intelligence infrastructure spending, which is driving higher investments in leading-edge foundry and logic technologies and boosting demand for its process-control solutions. In fiscal 2026, the Semiconductor Process Control segment's revenues increased 12% year over year, and overall fiscal 2026 revenues rose 12% year over year to $13.58 billion. During the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, management raised its calendar 2026 wafer-fabrication equipment market estimate, including advanced packaging, to the low-$150 billion range, up from its previous $140 billion-plus view and approximately $120 billion in calendar 2025. KLAC expects second-half 2026 revenues to be approximately 20% higher than the first half, aided by high-performance computing, high-bandwidth memory, increasing extreme ultraviolet adoption in DRAM and advanced packaging technologies such as hybrid bonding, and said backlog was expected to reach about $12.5 billion. The company faces intensifying competition from Applied Materials, which expects its process diagnostics and control business to grow more than 50% in calendar 2026, and from ASML, which expects advanced foundry and logic revenues to rise about 25% in 2026 and extreme ultraviolet revenues to increase roughly 45%.

Amazon Web Services posted $42.23 billion in revenue, growing 37% year over year, the segment's fastest growth in 18 quarters, with a 39.4% operating margin and a $496 billion contracted backlog. Amazon's chips and AI businesses each eclipsed run rates of more than $25 billion in the second quarter, both growing at triple-digit percentages year over year, while 98% of Amazon's top 1,000 EC2 customers use Graviton and Anthropic and OpenAI have made multi-year, multi-gigawatt commitments to Trainium. Q2 operating income landed at $27.46 billion, up 43.2% year over year, and advertising is a $70 billion-plus trailing-twelve-month business growing 26%. Capex reached $54.21 billion in a single quarter, up 68.4% year over year, and free cash flow swung to negative $7.6 billion on a trailing-twelve-month basis, though most AI capacity is contracted for at least five-year terms. Since Amazon reported Q2 on July 30, 2026, AMZN moved from $230.08 to $251.19, while SPY went from $747.03 to $762.70 and QQQ went from $687.99 to $716.92. Andy Jassy said AWS could become a few hundred billion dollar revenue business and now believes it will be at least double that and very possibly a trillion dollar annual revenue business in time.

Micron Technology is trading at roughly 6x forward earnings against a consensus analyst price target of $1,513.11, implying about 59% upside from its current $953.49 share price. The Boise-based memory maker, the only U.S.-headquartered producer of DRAM and NAND at scale, has signed 16 multi-year take-or-pay contracts covering roughly 25% of revenue, backed by $22 billion in cash deposits and letters of credit, with remaining performance obligations near $100 billion. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said AI has elevated the value of memory, and management expects high-bandwidth memory supply tightness to persist beyond calendar 2027, with data-center DRAM and NAND bit shipments projected to more than double from two years ago. Micron has already shipped over $1 billion in HBM4 revenue, with the 12-high volume ramp tracking twice as fast as HBM3E 12-high, and fiscal fourth-quarter guidance calls for record revenue of $50 billion plus or minus $1 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $31 plus or minus $1 at a gross margin near 86%. The stock is up 234.28% year-to-date and 501.33% over the past year, and beginning December 9, 2026, Micron plans to increase capital returns and eventually return 100% of excess cash to shareholders.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company expects to sell roughly twice as many chips next year as it does this year, calling it one of his strongest signals yet that AI demand remains far from exhausted. Speaking to reporters Thursday at a summit in Scotland with King Charles III, Huang said the reason is AI's contribution to different industries and economies, and that people in almost every country Nvidia operates in want to invest in AI. The forecast adds to Nvidia's increasingly aggressive outlook: the company recently said it expects roughly 70% growth in the fiscal year ending January 2028, which would put annual revenue around $673 billion. Nvidia does not disclose total chip unit shipments, making Huang's volume forecast difficult to translate directly into revenue, though its most important products include data-center GPUs, particularly Blackwell and next-generation Rubin systems; Huang said last fall that Nvidia had shipped about 6 million Blackwell GPUs over four quarters. The comments come as investors debate whether hyperscaler spending and model-training demand can keep growing at the breakneck pace seen during the first phase of the AI buildout, with the key question being not simply whether Nvidia can double chip volumes but what that mix looks like, since higher shipments of premium Blackwell and Rubin systems could support enormous revenue growth while greater unit volume at lower average selling prices would produce a different margin outcome.

United Microelectronics Corporation shares have soared 250.1% over the past year, far outpacing the industry's 25.8% gain, as improving foundry demand and AI exposure drive optimism. The company's 22/28-nanometer nodes contributed 37% of second-quarter revenues, with 22nm sales hitting another record, and management expects third-quarter wafer shipments to rise by a high single-digit percentage sequentially with capacity utilization exceeding 90%. UMC expects AI-related revenues to approach $300 million in 2026 and exceed $1 billion within three years, and it recently began mass-production delivery of silicon photonics wafers from its 12-inch Singapore facility, with plans to open its own 12-inch silicon photonics platform to broader customers in 2027. Its collaboration with Intel on a 12nm process platform is expected to begin production in Arizona in 2027. The 2026 earnings estimate now stands at $1.23 per share, up 75.7% over the past 60 days, and the stock carries a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Thursday he expects the company to sell twice as many chips in the next year as it did this year, a signal to investors that demand has not yet peaked. Huang attributed the outlook to AI investment spreading across industries, economies and countries. Management said consumer expectations point to another doubling of growth next year, and Nvidia projected around 70% revenue growth for the fiscal year ending January 2028, bringing revenue to almost $673 billion. Management classified the outlook as supply tight, implying Nvidia's capacity to ship chips could remain one of the largest impediments to growth. Last year, Huang said the company shipped around 6 million Blackwell GPUs in four quarters, and Rubin is now coming up as the next big part of the product cycle.

Stars Microelectronics (Thailand) Public Company Limited, or SMT, has unveiled plans to expand production capacity and upgrade its capabilities in Flip-Chip, Advanced Packaging and High Density Packaging, alongside the development of Wafer Processing for Photonic Integrated Circuits, or PIC, to serve increasingly complex and high-value semiconductor products. Chief Executive Officer Promphong Chaiyakul disclosed the plans during a Company Visit held at the Bang Pa-in Industrial Estate in Ayutthaya Province on 15 September 2026, for an audience of fund managers and analysts. The company said its business outlook continues to improve, particularly in the Optical and Photonics segment and products related to AI Infrastructure, which could serve as a key driver of growth in the period ahead. SMT is also strengthening its position through full vertical integration, spanning Wafer Processing, IC Packaging, Optical and Photonics, and PCBA and Box Build, as well as joint product development and design with customers, in order to add value to each project and build long-term business relationships. The company believes these investments will help it meet demand from global customers in the AI, Data Center, Optical Connectivity and digital infrastructure industries, which are expected to keep expanding.

KKP Research, part of the Kiatnakin Phatra Financial Group, has raised its forecast for Thailand's economic growth in 2026 to 2.5% from 2.1%, and for 2027 to 2.7% from 2.2%, driven by the tourism sector, private investment, and exports linked to the global artificial intelligence investment cycle, or AI capex cycle. It noted, however, that the Thai economy is now fully entering a K-shaped recovery, in which some industries are soaring while the grassroots economy and traditional industries remain sluggish. The main driver comes from the electronics supply chain, particularly the data storage industry and components related to AI infrastructure, in contrast to the country's four core industries, which face continued pressure: the automotive sector, hit by the transition to electric vehicles; petrochemicals, facing regional oversupply; and SMEs and electrical appliances, which must contend with competition from imported goods. KKP Research noted that although the IMF ranks Thailand among the world's four largest exporters of AI-related goods, the country remains constrained by its position at the assembly and contract-manufacturing stage and its heavy reliance on imported raw materials, meaning the domestic economic benefit is smaller than the rise in export value. It proposed that the government link BOI incentives to domestic value creation and set conditions on clean energy and closed-loop water systems. On monetary policy, KKP Research lowered its 2026 inflation forecast to 1.8% and expects the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of Thailand to hold the policy rate through the end of 2027, since inflationary pressure stems from cost factors that are temporary.

Applied Materials is committing $5 billion over a decade to India's semiconductor push, a bet on research, suppliers and talent that Reuters reported Thursday. The spending plan works out to roughly $500 million a year and targets the infrastructure India still needs to become a serious chip-manufacturing hub. India expects semiconductor consumption to reach $110 billion by 2030, up from roughly $45 billion to $50 billion in 2025, but only three packaging plants are operating and a large-scale fabrication ecosystem has yet to fully emerge. For Applied, the annualized commitment equals only about 1.4% of revenue based on its record $9.12 billion quarterly sales, leaving room to build an early position without letting India dominate capital allocation. The shares traded around $416.40, up roughly 0.3%, and GuruFocus data shows the market price sitting 68.39% above GF Value of $247.28.

Camtek, the dominant player in advanced packaging inspection and metrology with about 60% market share, is positioning itself for strong growth as AI chip demand expands. In its most recent quarter, roughly 80% of orders were for advanced packaging inspection, driven by memory chip manufacturers transitioning to HBM4 chips and expanding production amid the memory shortage. Camtek's Q2 revenue rose 8% year over year to a record $133 million, and third-quarter revenue is expected to rise about 20% sequentially to around $159 million, with second-half revenue projected to grow 25% over the first half. CEO Rafi Amit said on the Q2 earnings call that the company's leading position in advanced packaging is expected to drive approximately 45% growth in that business in the second half of 2026 compared with the first half. The broader advanced packaging inspection industry is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 11% over the next five years to $6.2 billion, up from $3.7 billion in 2026, and most orders coming in now will be executed in 2027. Camtek stock is up 25% year to date and 52% over the past 12 months, though it has fallen about 35% from its May peak, leaving its trailing P/E around 184 and its forward P/E at 27, with analysts holding a median price target of $190 per share.

Arm CEO Rene Haas said demand is running at record strength across edge, automotive, robotics and data center, and that near-term revenue growth is capped by a multi-stage manufacturing bottleneck spanning wafers, substrates, testers and memory rather than by any softening in orders. Data-center royalty revenue more than doubled year over year last quarter, and the most recent 500 million Neoverse cores shipped in nine months after the first billion took six years, while IDC reported spending on Arm-based accelerated server platforms nearly doubled over the past two quarters and surpassed x86. Haas said his confidence in hitting the $2 billion AGI CPU target rose from May to July and again from July to September, after he earlier cut that target to $1 billion on foundry capacity worries, and Arm has secured the manufacturing capacity needed to support the $1 billion opportunity for the AGI CPU. The AGI CPU, Arm's first in-house data center chip, carries first-generation gross margin guidance in the high 30% range to low 40s with a path to 50% over the next couple of years, below core royalty margins, so silicon revenue will initially dilute reported profitability. Arm shares trade at $243.98, down 10.11% over the past month and 7.66% in the last week but up 123.2% year to date, at a trailing P/E near 247x, after Q1 FY2027 EPS of $0.25 missed the $0.40 estimate and operating margin compressed to 7% from 11%; analysts carry an average target of $288.70.

Yuanta Securities (Thailand) said in an analysis note after visiting the factory of Stars Microelectronics (Thailand), or SMT, that the recovery trend in its business has become clearer, with second-quarter 2026 results reflecting a rebound in revenue, capacity utilisation and margins, and it expects the third and fourth quarters of 2026 to improve significantly on the prior quarter. SMT currently has advance orders covering roughly 8 to 12 months of production and targets 2026 revenue of no less than 2.6 billion baht, while for 2027 it expects growth of more than 10%, or above 3 billion baht. Yuanta views current estimates as based on fairly conservative assumptions and sees upside if orders convert to revenue faster than expected, particularly in wafer dicing, where market supply is constrained. Yuanta sees the Optical business becoming SMT's new growth engine on the back of AI growth, since the Optical and OSAT segments benefit directly from AI infrastructure investment and carry higher margins than the traditional business. Revenue from SMT's AI-related customers is still at an early stage and accounts for less than 5% of total revenue, but has the chance to rise to at least 10% next year. Meanwhile, its collaboration with Lumentum, a major player in the global Optical supply chain, marks an important starting point covering joint investment and development work. Yuanta expects SMT revenue of 2.67 billion baht in 2026, rising to 3.11 billion baht in 2027, and forecasts normalised profit of 150 million baht in 2026, rising to 256 million baht in 2027, or growth of about 70% from the previous year. On 2027 valuation, the stock trades at a PER of about 19 times, still below peers trading at roughly 28 to 58 times. Yuanta maintains its Buy rating on SMT with a target price of 7.60 baht, based on a PER of 25 times, compared with the closing price on 15 September 2026 of 5.85 baht, implying upside of about 29.9%.

China has unveiled a new five-year development plan for manufacturing in electronics- and information technology-related industries, setting a target to raise revenue above 30 trillion yuan, or 4.5 trillion dollars, by 2030. The plan was drawn up jointly by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, or MIIT, and the National Development and Reform Commission, or NDRC. It covers the strategic framework from 2026 to 2030 and reflects the Chinese government's push for supply chain self-reliance, aiming for global leadership in strategically important emerging technologies from artificial intelligence to advanced computing, amid ongoing global competition. Beyond the revenue target, China also aims to raise research and development investment in the industry to 3.5% by 2030, setting out 17 missions covering nine key industry groups, from electronic components and materials, specialised manufacturing and measurement equipment, photonics, advanced computing, consumer electronics, power electronics, positioning and timing information technology, chips and AI endpoint devices, through to industrial electronics. The plan also drives technology development in the integrated circuit industry supply chain, while upgrading advanced electronic materials and smart sensors. In computing and memory, China will develop high-bandwidth flash memory alongside new forms of storage products such as Ferroelectric RAM, Resistive RAM and Magnetoresistive RAM, and aims to build very large-scale intelligent computing infrastructure supporting AI clusters equipped with hundreds of thousands of accelerator cards, while accelerating the deployment of space computing technology. The announcement of this sector-specific plan follows China's release on September 7 of its 15th five-year development plan for the information and communications industry, drawn up by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

SK Hynix presented a structural shift in its business strategy at the 2026 Future Forum, saying it will move beyond selling faster chips to become a full-stack AI memory creator that jointly designs complete, workload-optimized memory architectures with customers. The South Korean company said it aims to collaborate across AI services, software, accelerators and memory rather than optimize memory devices in isolation, using 3D integration and advanced packaging as foundational technologies. SK Hynix recently began mass shipments of HBM4 and, in early August 2026, announced it will invest roughly 54 trillion KRW, or $38 billion, to expand domestic memory chip manufacturing in South Korea alongside a new $4 billion packaging plant in the United States. Last month the company announced an accelerated 40 trillion won, or $28.7 billion, share-repurchase and cancellation program, its largest treasury share cancellation in the history of South Korean listed companies, covering up to 24.07 million common shares, about 3.3% of its outstanding stock, over roughly three months from Aug. 20. SK Hynix also intends to return more than 50% of the cumulative free cash flow generated between 2025 and 2027 to shareholders, and its earnings per share estimates have risen over the past 60 days for the third quarter, the fourth quarter, full-year 2026 and 2027. The company carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy), and Wall Street's consensus price target points to approximately 42% upside from the current share price.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has guided the company's annual AI semiconductor revenue to reach $230 billion in its fiscal 2028, up from $16.7 billion in the third quarter, an annualized pace of just over $65 billion. Tan's earlier forecast, made in late 2024, projected AI revenue of $60 billion to $90 billion in 2027, but Broadcom now projects $115 billion in AI revenue for that year, making the original guidance a major underestimate. Broadcom's custom AI chip business, known as application-specific integrated circuits, counts Alphabet, Meta Platforms, OpenAI, and Anthropic among its clients. Tan said the company has secured the supply chain necessary to meet that demand. Wall Street analysts estimate Broadcom's total revenue will be $106 billion this fiscal year, leaving $41 billion in non-AI revenue if the AI projection holds.

Broadcom is trading at just 19 times forward earnings even as its AI semiconductor revenue surged 221% year over year to $16.70 billion, a disconnect that 24/7 Wall St. calls an opportunity with a $423.95 price target implying 22.31% upside from the current $344.05 quote. The call follows a fiscal Q3 report in which total revenue reached $29.591 billion, up 85.5% year over year, with non-GAAP EPS of $3.32 beating consensus, and management guided Q4 AI revenue to $21.7 billion. CEO Hock Tan said Q3 demand was simply hot and that the company is just getting started, and management now targets fiscal 2027 AI revenue of $115 billion and fiscal 2028 AI revenue of $230 billion across a $350 billion two-year shipment pipeline spanning six XPU customers including Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic. Broadcom's 19x forward multiple looks cheap against NVIDIA at 24x, AMD at 33x, and Marvell at 56x, despite faster AI revenue acceleration than those peers, and the Wall Street consensus target sits at $531.85 with 37 Buy and 8 Strong Buy ratings. Execution risk remains the biggest concern, with Tan flagging land, power, and shell constraints on capacity deployment and potential bottlenecks in HBM memory, substrates, and leading-edge wafers, while the bear scenario lands at $374.92, still above today's price.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing reported second-quarter 2026 EPS of $4.31 against a $3.8866 estimate, a 10.89% beat, on revenue of $40.2 billion, up 36.0% year over year, with gross margin of 67.7%, up 9.1 percentage points year over year. Advanced nodes at 7nm and below accounted for 77% of wafer revenue, with 3nm at 30%, 5nm at 33%, and 2nm debuting at 3% in its first commercial quarter. August monthly revenue rose 53.3% year over year, and management raised full-year 2026 growth guidance to slightly above 40% year over year in U.S. dollar terms. Management said packaging capacity is so tight that it is now a little bit of customers' growth, pointing to the CoWoS advanced packaging step as the industry's real choke point. The company guided that the steep 2nm ramp will dilute third-quarter gross margin by about 3 to 4 percentage points, while citing an additional $100 billion U.S. investment and a total Arizona commitment of $265 billion, $110 billion in cash and marketable securities, a 2024 to 2029 revenue CAGR approaching 25% in USD, and a long-term gross margin above 56%.

Worldwide data center capital expenditures accelerated sharply in 2Q 2026, growing 92 percent, according to a newly published report from Dell'Oro Group. Continued AI infrastructure investment supported growth across compute, storage, networking, and physical infrastructure, while rising memory and storage prices significantly increased server average selling prices. Baron Fung, Vice President of Research at Dell'Oro Group, said spending remained concentrated in NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra and hyperscaler custom accelerators, while agentic AI created incremental demand for general-purpose compute, storage, and complementary networking. Neocloud providers and AI model builders posted the fastest capex growth among customer segments, reflecting the early stages of their infrastructure buildouts, and Dell led server OEM revenue, followed by Supermicro and Lenovo, while white-box server revenue reached a record high. Fung added that ongoing accelerator deployments and emerging agentic AI and AI-related storage workloads should sustain strong capex growth through the remainder of 2026 and beyond, although supply constraints could limit the pace at which planned infrastructure is deployed.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan pushed back on fears of a broader AI slowdown and defended the company's long-term revenue targets. The semiconductor and infrastructure software company has growing exposure to specialized AI chips and networking, selling networking technology that connects large clusters of AI accelerators and emerging as a key participant in custom chips built for hyperscale customers. That position gives Broadcom exposure to AI spending without full reliance on the market for general purpose GPUs, a distinction that may matter more as technology firms build more custom silicon for cheaper, more effective handling of massive AI workloads. Tan's optimism offers investors a direct rebuttal to recent worries that the enormous infrastructure cycle behind AI equities could be cooling. The next test will be Broadcom's results and outlook, which will show whether customer orders continue to support management's long-term optimism.

Broadcom's AI semiconductor sales surged 221% year over year to $16.7 billion in its third quarter, pushing total revenue to $29.59 billion and lifting AI to about 56.4% of quarterly sales. Management guided fourth-quarter revenue to roughly $34.8 billion, including about $21.7 billion from AI chips, which would raise AI to roughly 62.4% of revenue and imply another $5 billion of sequential AI-chip growth in a single quarter. The stock slipped about 0.6% to $342.50 Tuesday morning as chip stocks struggled to rebound from Monday's AI-driven selloff, leaving shares 14.89% below GuruFocus' GF Value estimate of $402.41. The muted reaction reflects investor focus on how long hyperscalers can sustain their current spending pace.

Micron Technology announced the successful demonstration of the world's first 512GB DDR5 module on multiple server platforms, an ultra-dense RDIMM built on the company's advanced vertical interconnect packaging. The module stacks DRAM dies interconnected by through-silicon vias to maximize density, enabling up to 12TB of DDR5 DRAM in a single 24-slot dual-socket server, and delivers speeds up to 9,200 MT/s while cutting operating power by more than 60% compared with four 128GB RDIMMs. AMD and Intel are both actively validating the module across next-generation server platforms. Micron said the 512GB RDIMM can deliver up to 1.4 times higher performance than 256GB DDR5 configurations on memory-bound workloads such as Spark SVM-based data analytics, and offers throughput and concurrency gains for databases and caching platforms including RocksDB and Redis. Micron expects 512GB RDIMMs to enter volume production sometime in the second half of 2027, aligned to customer needs.

Piper Sandler initiated coverage of Broadcom Inc. with an Overweight rating and a $460 price target on September 9, with analyst David O'Connor calling the company the leader in ASIC chips with a 75% share of the ASIC market for AI inference. O'Connor estimates demand is running twice the available supply, making component availability and deployment timing the key determinants of whether that demand converts into earnings. Broadcom is already ramping Meta's MTIA program and OpenAI's Jalapeno chips along with two other customers, while Google's TPU program remains its major volume ASIC program and Anthropic scales deployments on AVGO-enabled TPU compute; a networking attach rate of around 30% could generate an estimated $20-30 billion of total content per gigawatt of deployed capacity. Piper sees a line of sight to 12 gigawatts of demand in fiscal 2027, rising toward an estimated 38 gigawatts by fiscal 2030, underpinning roughly 51% EPS compound growth through the decade, and its $460 target is based on a 14x multiple of estimated fiscal 2028 earnings. The firm also flags risks including eroding pricing power, customer concentration and lower relative gross margins, while 170 hedge funds held the stock in the second quarter, down slightly from 173 in the prior one.

Amazon.com and Wiwynn are expanding Wiwynn's advanced manufacturing facility in Socorro, Texas, with nearly 1,000 additional jobs expected by the end of 2027. Wiwynn says its total investment in the Texas facility will exceed $1.6 billion, with employment eventually expected to reach about 4,000 workers; the investment is being made by Wiwynn, not by Amazon itself. The facility manufactures and integrates the server systems and racks used in Amazon's data center infrastructure, including infrastructure tied to Amazon's custom silicon, whose Trainium and Graviton chip business Amazon says has a revenue run rate above $20 billion, with Trainium3 already nearly fully subscribed. The expansion comes as Amazon has raised its 2026 capital-spending outlook to roughly $220 billion, and CEO Andy Jassy has said the company still does not have enough computing capacity to meet customer demand. Reuters has reported that U.S. electricity consumption is expected to hit record levels in 2026 and 2027 on AI-driven data-center demand, and that Texas has temporarily halted new data-center grid connections while regulators examine a large pipeline of electricity requests.

In Advantest's segment information for the fiscal year ending March 2026, the Test System business posted revenue of 1.0193 trillion yen and operating profit of 518.7 billion yen, reaching an operating margin of 50.9%. While this business accounted for 90.3% of consolidated revenue, the Services and Others business posted revenue of 109.2 billion yen, or 9.7% of the total, with operating profit of 8.7 billion yen and a margin of just 8.0%; in the prior fiscal year ending March 2025, Services and Others had an operating loss of 16.1 billion yen. The Test System business's margin climbed sharply over two years, from 27.7% in the fiscal year ending March 2024 to 38.4% in the year ending March 2025 and 50.9% in the year ending March 2026, while the consolidated gross margin also rose from 50.6% to 57.1% and then 64.3%. According to its earnings release, demand for testers for AI-related high-performance semiconductors expanded significantly, and the sales mix shifted toward higher-margin products, lifting operating profit by 118.8% from the prior year. Research and development spending came to 78.1 billion yen, or 6.9% of revenue. The share price, after swinging widely, moved up from the 23,000 yen level at the end of October 2025 to the 33,000 yen level at the end of August 2026, and stood in the 31,000 yen range as of September 2026.

Aehr Test Systems is diversifying beyond its traditional silicon carbide exposure, with nearly 95% of fiscal 2026 revenues now coming from markets outside EV-related SiC, compared with more than 95% of its business tied to SiC for electric vehicles two years ago. AI accelerators, CPUs and network processors accounted for about 71% of fiscal 2026 revenues, while optical device test and burn-in for data-center infrastructure transceivers, chip-to-chip I/O and hard disk drives represented another 20%. Momentum has continued into fiscal 2027, with AEHR securing a $22 million follow-on order for AI processor wafer-level burn-in systems in August, along with another follow-on production order for silicon photonics. Power semiconductors provide another leg to the growth story, as AEHR received roughly $8 million of new SiC wafer-level burn-in orders in July as EV programs picked up, and the company is expanding into gallium nitride applications while memory remains a longer-term opportunity spanning NAND and high-bandwidth memory. The company's $100.6 million effective backlog and $130-$150 million fiscal 2027 revenue outlook support near-term growth, though sustaining that pace will depend on continued ramps in AI and silicon photonics, a recovery in power semiconductor demand and successful expansion into new applications. Aehr competes with Teradyne and FormFactor in a highly competitive semiconductor test equipment market, and its shares have surged 152.6% over the past six months, trading at a forward 12-month price-to-sales multiple of 19.05X versus the industry's 5.72X, with the Zacks Consensus Estimate for fiscal 2027 earnings at 74 cents per share.

Broadcom reported fiscal third-quarter 2026 results on Sept. 2, with revenue rising 86% year over year to $29.6 billion and adjusted earnings per share of $3.32, up 96%. Adjusted operating income climbed 92% to $20.1 billion and free cash flow reached $13.7 billion, up 95%, while the company's AI chip business posted revenue of $16.7 billion, up 221% year over year. Shares nonetheless fell after the report because Broadcom guided to fourth-quarter revenue of $34.8 billion, slightly below Wall Street's projections. Broadcom is forecasting about $115 billion in AI semiconductor revenue for fiscal year 2027, more than its trailing 12-month revenue of $89.1 billion, and management said demand for its AI chips currently exceeds the supply underpinning that outlook. The stock trades at 19.3x forward earnings versus an average of 20.2x for information technology stocks.

Broadcom reported fiscal third-quarter results after the close on Sept. 2, posting non-GAAP earnings per share of $3.32 on revenue of $29.59 billion, beating analyst targets of $3.24 per share on $29.36 billion in sales. The stock fell anyway, as the company guided for $34.8 billion in current-quarter sales, below the $35.03 billion average target. More significant than either the beat or the guidance, Broadcom said on its conference call that sales to Anthropic are on track to surpass sales to Alphabet's Google division, making Anthropic its largest purchaser of XPU hardware in 2027. Broadcom already ships its Ironwood Tensor Processing Unit to both Alphabet and Anthropic, and it expects Anthropic's purchases of Ironwood TPU version 8i compute to expand from 1 gigawatt in 2026 to 5 gigawatts in 2027, while projected deployment of Jalapeno XPU chips to OpenAI is seen rising from 1.3 gigawatts in 2027 to 5 gigawatts in 2028. Broadcom projected adjusted earnings per share of more than $30 in fiscal 2028, far ahead of the $25 average estimate.

Anthropic agreed to $517 billion in compute commitments covering 14.8 gigawatts of capacity in the 11 months through August 2026, according to The Information, even as CEO Dario Amodei publicly called on the industry to slow the pace of AI development. The commitments dwarf a prior investor disclosure of roughly $180 billion through 2029, with four additional deals struck since July alone, and Nvidia is reportedly in talks to invest up to $10 billion as an anchor investor in Anthropic's expected Nasdaq IPO. Anthropic told investors it expects a second consecutive quarter of adjusted operating profit, with inference gross margins exceeding 80% before distribution costs, and its revenue run rate climbed from roughly $9 billion to $65 billion in seven months, the Financial Times reported. Anthropic confidentially filed its IPO prospectus with the SEC in June 2026, with sources cited by Reuters putting its target valuation at around $2 trillion, up from its most recent private funding round valuation of $965 billion, and listing timing expected before the U.S. midterm elections in November 2026. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, speaking at Goldman Sachs's tech conference last week, forecast global AI infrastructure spending of $3 trillion to $4 trillion by 2030, while OpenAI's Sam Altman said his company will not go public in 2026.

Chippacking Technology disclosed its third-quarter earnings forecast, expecting operating revenue of about 330 million yuan in the third quarter of 2026, up about 61.26% year on year, and net profit attributable to owners of the parent of about 21.5 million yuan, turning from loss to profit year on year. The company said the gradual recovery of the semiconductor industry cycle is driving increased demand for packaging and testing. Range Technology plans to apply to relevant financial institutions for additional credit of no more than 50 billion yuan in total on top of its existing credit lines, in order to continue increasing investment in the AIDC sector. Gold Orange Technology decided to terminate the planned acquisition of a controlling stake in Shenzhen Zhibotaike Technology Co., Ltd. through the issuance of shares and cash payment, along with the related fundraising. Trading in the company's shares resumed from market open on September 15, 2026. GAC Group signed a letter of intent with China FAW Corporation Limited, planning to acquire part of the equity in a vehicle joint venture held by FAW Corporation through the issuance of shares, along with related fundraising. After the transaction is completed, FAW Corporation will become the company's second-largest shareholder. Trading in the company's A-shares was suspended from market open on September 14, 2026, and is expected to last no more than 10 trading days. Xiangshan Co., Ltd. plans to acquire 100% equity in Wuluo Smart for a tentative total consideration of 800 million yuan, along with related fundraising. After the transaction is completed, the company will form a dual-engine structure of auto parts and AI computing power. Trading in the company's shares resumed from market open on September 15, 2026.

Kiatnakin Phatra Securities, part of the Kiatnakin Phatra Financial Group, analyses that accelerating global AI investment will bring a new wave of FDI into Thailand, particularly in semiconductors, printed circuit boards, or PCBs, and advanced electronics. It estimates that Thailand's major industrial estate developers, WHA and AMATA, will see land sales rise by roughly 2,500 rai per year and 2,000 rai per year respectively. Although upstream technologies such as chip design and manufacturing remain concentrated overseas, Thailand is playing a growing role in the semiconductor supply chain for AI, especially in downstream manufacturing, the assembly and processing of advanced technology. Supapong Iamkongek, an analyst at Kiatnakin Phatra Securities, said global investment in AI will not stop at software or chips but is spreading to areas where Thailand has a cost advantage, namely infrastructure and downstream industries. If Thailand can fully attract this new wave of FDI into advanced production chains, it will not only boost the profits of listed companies but also raise the competitiveness of Thai industry on the world stage.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reiterated his forecast that global AI infrastructure spending could reach between $3 trillion and $4 trillion by 2030, repeating at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference on September 10 a call he first made at the same event exactly one year earlier. Huang said the semiconductor industry will keep getting larger and larger, citing a new layer of computing and the end of Moore's Law, and argued Nvidia has evolved beyond a chip supplier into something closer to a financial platform and infrastructure around AI, with system pricing climbing from about $18,000 per GPU for Hopper to near $25,000 for Blackwell and closer to $40,000 for the upcoming Vera Rubin platform. The forecast followed Nvidia's late-August quarter, which delivered adjusted earnings of $2.22 per share on revenue of $96.2 billion, beating Wall Street's estimates of $2.09 per share and $92.3 billion, with the Data Center segment bringing in $89 billion versus a projected $85.8 billion and the smaller gaming and physical AI unit generating $7.2 billion against expectations of $6.6 billion. Overall revenue grew 106 percent year over year and 18 percent from the prior quarter, and Nvidia told investors it expects 70% revenue growth for fiscal year 2028, well above the 45 percent growth Wall Street had penciled in, with Huang saying the increase could have topped 100% without supply constraints including an ongoing memory chip shortage. Nvidia expects gross margin to slip from 75% last quarter to roughly 74% in the current one, and its guidance near $108 billion for the October quarter assumes zero data center chip sales to China, while CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said at the same conference that his company is struggling to meet demand every day and that every GPU it has could be sold to multiple different clients.