Deposition & etch equipment

Deposition and etch machines build a chip layer by layer — laying thin films down, then carving them away with atomic precision, hundreds of process steps for every advanced wafer. That step count makes these tools the volume backbone of wafer-fab-equipment spending, a market running at record levels as AI logic and high-bandwidth memory investment push fabs to buy more of them per line. Three companies dominate the category — Applied Materials, Lam Research and Tokyo Electron — an allied-nation oligopoly whose segment shares shift between film types but whose collective grip does not. As chips go three-dimensional, with stacked memory and new transistor architectures, etch intensity per wafer keeps rising and the dependence deepens.

Because fabs order these tools years before capacity comes online, the big three's order books are the cleanest leading indicator of the global buildout — trouble shows up in their guidance before it shows up anywhere else in the chain. An export-control expansion or a demand collapse at the top three stalls fab ramps worldwide; there is no meaningful second tier to absorb the volume. The exposure is direct: Applied Materials, Lam Research and Tokyo Electron on the supply side, with TSMC, Samsung and Intel as the buyers whose expansion plans ride on delivery schedules.