Applied Materials (AMAT) is positioned to benefit from both AI chips and HBM because both are becoming increasingly difficult to manufacture, requiring more new materials and process steps and boosting demand for deposition, etch, polishing, inspection, and packaging equipment. AMAT participates in deposition, etch, ion implantation, thermal processing, chemical mechanical planarization, e-beam inspection, and advanced packaging, giving it opportunities to win orders across multiple process steps whether customers invest in advanced logic, DRAM, or HBM. Its growth does not depend solely on new wafer-fab capacity, since equipment value per wafer can continue to rise even if wafer output does not increase at the same rate. By the third quarter of fiscal 2026, quarterly revenue reached a record $9.115 billion, up 25% year over year; non-GAAP gross margin increased to 50.4%, and earnings per share rose 41% year over year to $3.50. The midpoint of fourth-quarter revenue guidance increased further to $10.25 billion.