ASE Technology Outperforms Amkor as AI Packaging Demand Surges

Tigress Financial reiterated its Buy rating on Intel and raised its price target to $145 from $118 on September 15, citing the company's Terafab partnership with companies associated with Elon Musk, including SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI, as a strategic boost to its AI foundry ambitions. The initiative is part of an ambitious semiconductor manufacturing project focused on producing advanced chips for artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and other compute-intensive applications. Intel said in its second-quarter earnings report that it remains well positioned to pursue sustainable growth through advanced packaging and its wafer foundry network, pointing to momentum in Physical AI and robotics with more than 130 customers testing its Core Ultra Series 3 and Core Series 3 processors for edge AI and robotics applications. The partnership's commercial terms, production volumes, and potential revenue contribution have not been fully disclosed, and the principal risk is that it could strengthen Intel's strategic position in foundry manufacturing without generating meaningful financial returns for several years. According to the Insider Monkey database, 138 hedge funds held stakes in Intel at the end of the second quarter, up from 112 funds in the first quarter, with SoftBank Group Corp. and Coatue Management among the notable institutional holders at approximately $12.14 billion and $1.68 billion, respectively, while roughly 152.25 million Intel shares were sold short as of August 31, representing about 3.02% of the public float.

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.