Nvidia CEO Huang says chip industry must grow tenfold to power 100 billion AI agents

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.