Lam Research is a premier AGI beneficiary — its etch and deposition equipment is physically essential for manufacturing the chips that AGI runs on, and advanced nodes only increase equipment intensity.
Lam Research is a major supplier of wafer fabrication equipment and services to the global semiconductor industry, specializing in thin-film deposition, plasma etch, and clean processes used in manufacturing memory and logic chips. The company is the dominant player in etch equipment (used to carve circuit patterns into silicon) and a leading provider of deposition tools (used to add thin layers of material to wafers). Lam's equipment is critical to producing NAND flash memory, DRAM, and advanced logic/foundry chips. The company benefits from the increasing complexity of 3D NAND (more layers require more etch/deposition steps) and advanced logic nodes.
Semiconductor manufacturers worldwide, including memory makers (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron), foundries (TSMC, Samsung Foundry), logic IDMs (Intel), and other chip fabricators. The customer base is highly concentrated - typically the top 3-5 customers account for 60-70% of revenue. Memory customers (NAND and DRAM) tend to represent a larger share of Lam's revenue compared to peers given its etch/deposition strength.
AGI cannot replace semiconductor etch and deposition equipment. Lam Research manufactures the plasma etch systems, chemical vapor deposition (CVD) tools, and cleaning systems that physically carve and layer nanoscale circuits onto silicon wafers. These are massive, precision-engineered chambers operating under extreme conditions (plasma, vacuum, precise gas chemistry). AGI could optimize process recipes and equipment parameters, but the physical chambers that process wafers must exist. Lam's customers are semiconductor fabs — the manufacturers of AGI's physical substrate. AGI cannot exist without chips, and chips cannot exist without Lam's equipment. As AGI drives exponential growth in compute demand, fabs invest more in capacity and advanced nodes, directly benefiting Lam.