Semiconductor Equipment
Lithography, etch, deposition, inspection, and advanced packaging tools.
Stack position
Where Semiconductor Equipment sits in the AI stack
L2 · Semiconductor Materials
Silicon wafers, photoresist, specialty gases, and process chemicals — few suppliers per node.
L3 · Semiconductor Equipment
Lithography, etch, deposition, inspection, and advanced packaging tools.
L3b · Foundry
Contract wafer fabrication and advanced packaging that turn accelerator designs into silicon.
L4 · Compute
GPUs, AI accelerators, and general-purpose compute silicon for training and inference.
Icons mark layer roles — not company logos. Position only; not a price chart.
Why this layer matters
Wafer demand converts into tool demand: lithography, etch, deposition, inspection, and the advanced packaging steps that bond HBM stacks to logic. Equipment sits two steps removed from AI headlines and one step ahead of capacity.
What is the bottleneck?
Some steps have effectively one supplier worldwide. Advanced packaging capacity, not wafer starts, has repeatedly been the limit on how many accelerators can ship.
A structural observation about supplier concentration and lead times — not a view on any security.
Who sits in this layer?
Company
TERPrimary business sits hereAutomated test equipment for semiconductors, including AI accelerator test.
Company
AMATPrimary business sits hereDeposition, etch, and process equipment across logic, memory, and packaging.
Company
LRCXPrimary business sits hereEtch and deposition equipment, heavily used in memory and advanced packaging.
Company
KLACPrimary business sits hereProcess control, inspection, and metrology systems.
Company
ASMLPrimary business sits hereLithography systems, including the EUV tools used at leading-edge nodes.
Company
ONTOPrimary business sits hereInspection and metrology, including advanced packaging process control.
Company
ACMRPrimary business sits hereWafer cleaning and surface preparation equipment.
Public 13F filings citing these securities
Research context, not a recommendation. These are facts on file with the SEC; the classification that puts a security in this layer is ours, and the filer made no such claim.
- ARK Investment Managementreported a position inTERForm 13F-HR for the period ending 2026-06-30, filed 2026-08-14 · SEC filing
- Bridgewater Associatesreported a position inTERForm 13F-HR for the period ending 2026-06-30, filed 2026-08-14 · SEC filing
Rows below are public SEC Form 13F-HR filings, reported by the filing entity for the period shown and filed later — they are never current holdings. Form 13F covers long US equity positions only: it excludes short positions, cash, non-US holdings and most derivatives, and a reported position may have been sold since. Assigning a ticker to a layer is XingAI's classification, not the filer's. Nothing here is a recommendation, and an institution reporting a position is not a reason to take one.
Coverage boundary
Coverage boundary: US-listed tickers or ADRs only (same rule as TSM / ASML). Important suppliers without a US listing are omitted even when they matter to the stack. That is a coverage rule, not a quality ranking.
- Tokyo Electron — Major process-tool vendor; listed in Japan, not as a US primary ticker here.
- Disco — Major dicing / grinding equipment vendor; Japan-listed.
Checked 2026-10-09. Not exhaustive.
Same track
Descriptive positioning only. The positioning label says whether a company's business is exposed to a layer, never whether to buy it. Layers with no exposure are not recommendations to add any.