Applied Materials is increasing its Besi stake to about 20%, up from roughly 9% after it bought in April 2025, the company said on Monday. Besi, the Dutch maker of assembly equipment for the semiconductor industry, rose 9.3% at the open in Amsterdam on Tuesday, according to Reuters.

Nothing has changed hands yet. Applied signed an accelerated share purchase agreement, and delivery of the shares waits on the expiry or termination of the US antitrust waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act. The release I read gives no price and no share count. Applied also says it has no intention of going past about 20% and doesn’t plan to seek a board seat at Besi.

The money’s purpose is spelled out more precisely than I expected. Applied calls hybrid bonding and next-generation interconnect “increasingly critical enablers” of energy-efficient AI compute, and the collaboration list runs from 3D IC scaling and logic and memory integration to thermo-compression bonding and die-on-wafer, die-on-die and die-on-panel platforms. The two companies have worked together since 2020, and Besi recently joined Applied’s EPIC Center as an Innovation Partner, so this is a bigger bet on a relationship that already existed, not a new one. I wrote about Besi earlier this month when Bank of America downgraded it over a hybrid bonder ASML hasn’t announced, and the obvious temptation is to read Applied’s move as a reply. Neither company says so, the timing proves nothing, and I’d rather leave it as a coincidence I noticed than a motive I assigned.

The part I find more interesting is where packaging sits in the queue. ASML’s chief executive said in mid-October that capacity won’t meet demand in 2027 or 2028, and TSMC is reportedly pushing CoWoS work out to its assembly partners because Nvidia has locked up so much of it. Bonding tools sit downstream of both problems, and if the chiplet designs I keep writing about are where AI hardware is heading, the machines that join the pieces become a bottleneck of their own. A 20% holding with no board seat doesn’t buy control, and I can’t tell from the release whether it buys anything beyond alignment.

Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting periods usually run 30 days once filed, which would push share delivery to late November or December, but I haven’t found the filing date.

Sources