TSMC TSM
TSMC fabricates the advanced processors behind the AI boom, including Nvidia GPUs, AMD accelerators, and Google's TPUs u...
Foundries and chip equipment.
The fabs and lithography tools that make advanced AI silicon possible. Capacity here constrains the whole industry.
ASML ASML
ASML holds a near-monopoly on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, the equipment required to pattern the most advanced...
Applied Materials AMAT
Applied Materials is the world's largest maker of wafer fabrication equipment. Every major chip fab expansion, from TSMC...
Lam Research LRCX
Lam Research makes etch and deposition equipment critical to advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Its tools are used at...
The factories behind every AI chip.
Designing an AI chip is one business; making it is another. TSMC manufactures almost all of the leading AI accelerators, for Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom and the custom-chip programs of the large cloud companies. It also packages them: CoWoS, its technique for placing a processor and memory stacks side by side on one base, has been one of the tightest bottlenecks in AI, and TSMC is reported to plan to roughly double that capacity by 2028.
The equipment makers.
Chip factories run on machines from a small group of suppliers. ASML, based in Veldhoven in the Netherlands, is the only company that makes extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, which print the smallest features on leading chips. Its next generation, High-NA, costs roughly $400 million per machine, and in 2026 TSMC, Samsung and SK Hynix all set dates to use it in production. Applied Materials and Lam Research supply the deposition and etching tools used at nearly every step, and demand for both rises with HBM stacking and advanced packaging.
ASML has also become an AI investor directly: it led Mistral AI's €1.7 billion round in September 2025, putting in €1.3 billion, and joined its next round in 2026.
What moves these stocks.
Chipmakers' own capital spending plans, which follow AI demand with a lag, and order backlogs at the equipment makers. Because these companies sit one step further from AI end demand than the chip designers, they tend to react later in both directions.
Risks to weigh.
Geopolitics is the big one. Most leading-edge production is in Taiwan, and export rules limit what the equipment makers can sell to China, historically a large market for them. Semiconductor equipment is also one of the most cyclical industries in tech: orders can drop sharply when chipmakers decide they have built enough.