Under the raging tide of artificial intelligence, the long-term low-key semiconductor equipment finally can't be hidden anymore! The "core eye" of this EUV chain soared by over 20% in a single day.

At the GTC conference, Huang Renxun released a series of powerful catalysts, and after Microsoft Corporation, Alphabet Inc. Class C, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, released signals of continuing to invest heavily in AI computing power infrastructure to build AI data centers on a large scale during their latest earnings conferences, the global AI chip industry has fallen into a long-term bullish atmosphere, especially with the "AI chip superpower" NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) surpassing and stabilizing its total market value at over $5 trillion, becoming the world's first company to reach a market value of $5 trillion. It is understood that not only leading AI computing power infrastructure companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR, Broadcom Inc., Micron, AMD, and SK Hynix have seen a significant increase in their stock prices, but also semiconductor equipment suppliers that have been very low-key in the global stock market for a long time have recently experienced substantial increases. These semiconductor equipment manufacturers have launched a variety of high-end manufacturing equipment that is crucial for the AI training/inference-related chip manufacturing capabilities of companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR, Samsung, and Micron, which is why semiconductor equipment giants in the US stock market such as Applied Materials, ASML Holding NV ADR, KLA, and Teradyne, Inc. have seen significant stock price increases, with Teradyne, Inc. rising by over 20% on Wednesday, mainly due to the surge in demand for AI chips bringing in huge orders for detection equipment for Teradyne, Inc. In the Japanese stock market, Lasertec, a semiconductor equipment company that has been very low-key but is crucial in the global semiconductor field, saw its stock price rise by 21% on Thursday, reaching a market value of $17.5 billion. This rare surge is the largest increase for Lasertec in over a year, pushing the company's stock price to its highest point since August 2024, occurring the day before the company announced its latest quarterly performance, with analysts generally expecting a significant 27% revenue increase. Lasertec is focused on EUV mask actinic inspection, which is a crucial and indispensable technology link in the global AI chip industry chain. As a key provider of advanced AI chip manufacturing technology, Lasertec has been seen as a major beneficiary of this unprecedented wave of AI since the beginning of this year, with gains of up to an astonishing 80% since September. Earlier, NVIDIA Corporation CEO Huang Renxun released the heavyweight prospect that NVIDIA Corporation may achieve "data center revenue exceeding $500 billion in the next five quarters", and coupled with Alphabet Inc. Class C and Microsoft Corporation, Meta announced continued significant investments in AI computing power infrastructure, driving up the stock prices of the entire AI chip industry chain, with Lasertec, which has always been low-key, being the focus of global funds and emerging as the strongest rising chip company in the industry chain. Lasertec - The Core Force of EUV Lithography Using globally leading lithography giant ASML Holding NV ADR (ASML)'s extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, the most advanced lithography method, to manufacture AI chips or other advanced process chips of 3nm and below, Lasertec's EUV inspection equipment must be used in the final process to verify the semiconductor structure design. The company based in Yokohama, Japan, saw its stock price upgraded to "buy" by Aletheia Capital's senior analyst Warren Lau on the day before its performance was announced. Lasertec can be said to be the most critical link in the chip manufacturing process - the "mask quality inspection/measurement" in the "EUV lithography chain": using the same 13.5nm actinic as EUV to discover "printable defects" that can only be exposed under EUV lithography conditions, ensuring mask yield and production stability, and is a key link for the successful implementation of EUV lithography process. The current AI chip and high-end storage super cycle are precisely expanding the application boundary and production capacity of EUV and High-NA, with more EUV layers and more stringent defect thresholds, directly driving actinic mask inspection capacity and installation. In the process of chasing after the chip manufacturing industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR, Samsung Electronics announced on Thursday that its chip foundry business department had received record orders for AI chips and advanced process chips in the third quarter ending in September, and plans to accelerate the production of 2nm chips. The South Korean company with the highest market value also plans to significantly increase the utilization rate of its wafer foundry lines and continue to expand its advanced chip manufacturing and advanced packaging capacity in the three months ending in December. Founded in 1960, Lasertec, its revenue trajectory has shown synchronous growth with the expansion scale of ASML Holding NV ADREUV lithography machines, with its mask-related critical inspection equipment accounting for a significant proportion of revenue long term, used for CPU chip manufacturing process and increasingly large-scale use in HBM storage systems and AI chip manufacturing capacity in recent years, these advanced process chip components are used for training artificial intelligence models and processing giant AI inference workloads and large datasets. The explosive expansion of AI computing power demand globally, coupled with the increasingly large AI infrastructure investment projects led by the US government, and the continuous massive investments by tech giants such as Microsoft Corporation, Alphabet Inc. Class C, and Meta in building large data centers, largely signifies that for long-term investors who are devoted to NVIDIA Corporation and the AI computing power industry chain, the global "AI faith" that is sweeping the world is far from over in terms of stock price "super catalysts", and they are betting that the stock prices of companies leading the AI computing power industry chain such as NVIDIA Corporation, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR, and Broadcom Inc. will continue to interpret the "bull market curve". The AI application driven by generative AI and AI intelligent agents dominates the inference end, bringing about an AI computing power demand that can be called "star-studded". It has the potential to continue to drive the exponential growth of the artificial intelligence computing infrastructure market, and the "AI inference system" is also the largest source of future revenue for NVIDIA Corporation according to Huang Renxun. On Wall Street, financial giants Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Morgan Stanley, Citi, Loop Capital, and Wedbush believe that the global artificial intelligence infrastructure investment wave centered around AI computing hardware is far from over, with only just the beginning, under the unprecedented "AI computing power demand storm" driving force, this round of AI investment wave is expected to reach $2-3 trillion. As the earnings season in the stock market unfolds, the strong performance of leaders in the AI computing power industry chain such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR, ASML Holding NV ADR, Anfeno, SK Hynix undoubtedly strengthens the narrative logic of the "long-term AI bull market" in the global stock market and the "AI investment faith" of technology stock believers. This also means that the current "super bull market" trend led by companies in the global AI computing power industry chain such as NVIDIA Corporation, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Sponsored ADR, Broadcom Inc., and Micron Technology, Inc. is far from over. Wall Street financial giant Wells Fargo & Company recently released an optimistic research report on the semiconductor equipment industry, stating that as the global AI infrastructure construction led by tech giants like Microsoft Corporation, Alphabet Inc. Class C, and Meta grows increasingly hot, greatly assisting in the acceleration of expanding production of chips with advanced processes of 3nm and below and advanced packaging capacity, the long-term bull market logic of the semiconductor equipment sector remains very robust. Wells Fargo & Company is most bullish on the lithography giant ASML Holding NV ADR (ASML.US) and the high-end equipment provided by Applied Materials (AMAT.US) that play a crucial role in manufacturing chips in every step, as well as KLA (KLAC.US) focusing on defect inspection in the chip manufacturing process and chemical process control, and yield management mechanisms, all given a "buy" rating and a target price indicating that the "bull market trajectory" of these giants, which have shown strong growth this year, is far from over. Wells Fargo & Company points out that all news about catalyzing advanced process AI chip capacity is positive and forward-looking for the semiconductor equipment sector. The firm states that the much more complex architecture update iteration and performance-enhanced CPU/GPU heterogeneous packaging (based on NVLink interconnect, as well as CoWoS/EMIB/Foveros and other chiplet advanced packaging) will greatly boost the structural demand for EUV/High-NA lithography machines, advanced packaging equipment, and inspection measurement, particularly benefiting ASML Holding NV ADR, Applied Materials, and KLA.