Following NVIDIA's market capitalization surpassing $5 trillion, the share price of Lasertec Corporation experienced a rare surge of over 20%. Lasertec specializes in EUV mask actinic inspection, a crucial and indispensable technological component within the global AI chip supply chain.
According to Zhitong Finance APP, following a series of significant positive catalysts released by Jensen Huang at the GTC conference, as well as major signals from Microsoft, Google, and Meta (Facebook’s parent company) during their latest earnings calls indicating continued massive investments in AI computing infrastructure to build large-scale AI data centers, the global AI chip industry chain has entered a prolonged bullish atmosphere of “optimistic euphoria.” Notably, NVIDIA (NVDA.US), the “superpower of AI chips,” surpassed and solidified its market capitalization above the $5 trillion mark, becoming the world's first company to reach this valuation.
It is understood that not only did the stock prices of leaders in AI computing infrastructure such as Taiwan Semiconductor, Broadcom, Micron Technology, AMD, and SK Hynix soar, but semiconductor equipment suppliers — who have long been low-profile and whose stock prices have remained relatively stable in global equity markets — also experienced substantial gains recently. The advanced manufacturing equipment introduced by these semiconductor equipment manufacturers is critical for the production capacity of AI training/inference-related chips by giants like Taiwan Semiconductor, Samsung, and Micron Technology. This explains why shares of semiconductor equipment giants listed in the U.S., including Applied Materials, ASML Holding, KLA Corp, and Teradyne, surged significantly. Notably, Teradyne’s stock price rose over 20% on Wednesday, mainly driven by a surge in demand for AI chips, which brought massive orders for Teradyne’s testing equipment.
In Japan’s stock market, Lasertec, a historically low-profile yet crucial semiconductor equipment company in the global semiconductor sector, saw its stock price surge 21% on Thursday, reaching a market capitalization of $17.5 billion. This rare jump marked the largest increase for Lasertec in over a year, propelling the company’s stock to its highest point since August 2024. The surge occurred a day before the company announced its latest quarterly earnings, with analysts widely expecting revenue to grow by an impressive 27%. The EUV mask actinic inspection technology that Lasertec specializes in represents a vital and indispensable link in the global AI chip supply chain.
As a key provider of advanced manufacturing technology for cutting-edge AI chips, Lasertec has been regarded as one of the core beneficiaries of this unprecedented AI boom since the beginning of the year. Its stock price has surged an astonishing 80% since September. Previously, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang indicated that NVIDIA might achieve “data center business revenue exceeding $500 billion” over the next five quarters. Coupled with announcements from Google, Microsoft, and Meta about continuing to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in AI computing infrastructure, this has driven significant stock price increases across the entire AI chip supply chain. Among them, the traditionally low-profile Lasertec has attracted substantial global capital attention and emerged as the strongest-performing chip company in the industry.
Lasertec – A Core Force in the EUV Lithography Process
It is understood that using the most advanced lithography method, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography from ASML Holding, a global leader in lithography machines, to manufacture AI chips or other advanced process chips of 3nm and below currently requires Lasertec’s EUV inspection equipment to verify semiconductor architecture designs in the final stages. The stock of this Yokohama, Japan-based company was upgraded to “Buy,” the most optimistic bullish rating, by senior analyst Warren Lau of Aletheia Capital a day before the earnings release.
Lasertec is arguably the most critical link in the chip manufacturing process — the “mask inspection/metrology” core supplier within the “EUV lithography chain.” Using 13.5nm actinic light, the same wavelength as EUV, it identifies “printable defects” that can only be exposed under EUV lithography conditions, ensuring mask yield and stable mass production. This is a key step enabling the smooth implementation of the EUV lithography process. The ongoing supercycle of AI chips and high-end memory is expanding the application boundaries and production capacity of EUV and High-NA technologies — the more complex and extensive the masks become, the stronger Lasertec’s scarcity, leading to greater order volumes and valuation elasticity.
This Yokohama, Japan-based semiconductor inspection and metrology equipment manufacturer has long focused on the niche track of EUV/High-NA EUV photomask and mask blank inspection. It holds a significant share and offers unique inspection products in the global mask inspection/metrology market. The company’s external materials position itself as “a leading global supplier of semiconductor mask and mask blank inspection systems.”
Lasertec has long maintained deep collaborations with the world's leading chip foundries, ranging from Taiwan Semiconductor and Intel to South Korean chip manufacturing giants Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. As global enterprises and sovereign institutions increasingly demand AI computing power infrastructure from chip leaders such as NVIDIA and AMD, order volumes for semiconductor equipment giants like Lasertec, ASML Holding, and Applied Materials have been expanding significantly in recent times.
The explosive growth in demand for AI GPUs, AI ASICs (such as NVIDIA/AMD AI GPUs and Broadcom ASICs), and HBM memory systems has driven major wafer fabs like Taiwan Semiconductor to further invest in advanced process nodes of 3nm and 2nm, heavily relying on EUV lithography chains while planning a transition toward High-NA technology. The increasing number of EUV layers and more stringent defect thresholds are directly driving up actinic mask inspection capacity and installations.
In its effort to catch up with industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics announced on Thursday that its foundry business unit received record-breaking orders for AI chips and advanced process chips in the third quarter ending September. The company plans to accelerate the mass production of 2nm chips. This most valuable publicly listed company in South Korea also intends to significantly increase the utilization rate of its wafer production lines and continue expanding its advanced chip manufacturing and advanced packaging capacities over the three months ending December.
Founded in 1960, Lasertec’s sales have grown in tandem with the expansion scale of ASML Holding's EUV lithography machines. Its critical inspection equipment related to photomasks has consistently accounted for a significant portion of its sales revenue, traditionally used in CPU chip manufacturing processes. In recent years, it has been increasingly deployed on a larger scale in HBM memory systems and AI chip production capacities. These advanced process chip components are utilized for training artificial intelligence models and handling massive AI inference workloads and large datasets.
The explosive expansion of AI computing power demand has ushered in a 'super bull market' for semiconductor equipment manufacturers.
The continued explosive global expansion of AI computing demand, coupled with increasingly large AI infrastructure investment projects led by the U.S. government and substantial investments by tech giants in building large-scale data centers, largely indicates that for long-term investors favoring NVIDIA and the AI computing supply chain, the sweeping 'AI belief' remains a powerful catalyst for the stock prices of industry leaders. These investors are betting that the stocks of companies led by NVIDIA, Taiwan Semiconductor, and Broadcom in the AI computing supply chain will continue to follow a 'bullish curve.'
The demand for AI computing power driven by generative AI applications and AI agents in inference operations can be described as 'boundless,' potentially propelling the AI computing infrastructure market into exponential growth. Jensen Huang believes that the 'AI inference system' will become NVIDIA’s largest future revenue source.
According to Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citi, Loop Capital, and Wedbush—giants of Wall Street—the global investment wave in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure centered on AI computing hardware is far from over. We are merely at the beginning. Driven by an unprecedented 'storm of AI computing demand,' this round of AI investment could reach a scale of $2 trillion to $3 trillion.
With the opening of the earnings season for the stock market, the impressive performances of leaders in the AI computing supply chain, such as Taiwan Semiconductor, ASML Holding, Amphenol, and SK Hynix, have undoubtedly reinforced the 'long-term AI bull market' narrative in global equity markets, as well as the 'AI investment faith' among technology stock believers. This also implies that the 'super bull market rally' driven by NVIDIA, Taiwan Semiconductor, Broadcom, and Micron Technology in the global AI computing supply chain is far from over.
Wells Fargo & Co., the Wall Street financial giant, recently issued a bullish research report on the semiconductor equipment sector. The firm stated that as global AI infrastructure construction led by tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Meta heats up, there is comprehensive support for accelerating the expansion of advanced process nodes at 3nm and below, alongside the significant ramp-up of advanced packaging capacities. The long-term bull market thesis for the semiconductor equipment sector remains very robust.
Wells Fargo is most optimistic about ASML Holding, whose high-end equipment plays an important role in every step of chip manufacturing, as well as Applied Materials and KLA Corp, which focus on defect detection, chemical process control, and yield management mechanisms during chip manufacturing. The bank has assigned these companies ratings equivalent to “buy,” with target prices indicating that this year’s strong rally for these giants is far from over.
Wells Fargo noted that all news related to catalyzing advanced-process AI chip production capacity is positive for semiconductor equipment. The firm explained that architectural updates, which are much more complex and deliver stronger performance through heterogeneous CPU/GPU packaging (based on NVLink interconnects and advanced packaging technologies like CoWoS, EMIB, and Foveros), will significantly boost structural demand for EUV/High-NA lithography machines, advanced packaging equipment, and inspection metrology. This trend particularly benefits ASML, Applied Materials, and KLA Corp.
