KLA is a premier AGI beneficiary — its semiconductor inspection equipment becomes more critical as AGI drives demand for advanced chips, and its physical instruments at nanometer scale cannot be digitally replicated.
KLA Corporation is a leading supplier of process control and yield management equipment for the semiconductor and related electronics industries. The company's systems are used to inspect and measure semiconductor wafers and photomasks at various stages of the chip manufacturing process to detect defects and ensure quality. KLA dominates the semiconductor inspection and metrology market with an estimated 50%+ market share. The company is considered essential to enabling the production of advanced chips, as its tools help fabs identify yield-killing defects that become increasingly critical at smaller node sizes.
Semiconductor manufacturers (foundries, IDMs, memory makers) including TSMC, Samsung, Intel, SK Hynix, Micron, GlobalFoundries, and other major chip fabs. Also serves printed circuit board manufacturers, flat panel display makers, and advanced packaging facilities. The customer base is highly concentrated among a small number of large semiconductor companies.
AGI cannot replace semiconductor inspection and metrology equipment. KLA manufactures the optical and e-beam inspection systems, wafer defect review tools, and process control equipment that ensures semiconductor manufacturing yields. These are extraordinarily complex physical instruments — laser-based imaging systems operating at nanometer scales. As chips become more complex (driven by AGI compute demands), KLA's inspection equipment becomes more critical, not less. KLA's customers are semiconductor fabs — TSMC, Samsung, Intel, SK Hynix, GlobalFoundries, and others. These are the foundational manufacturers of the compute hardware that AGI runs on. As AGI demand explodes, fabs invest more in capacity and advanced processes, which means more KLA inspection equipment.