应用材料投资者日强调AI检测与HBM封装机会，但股价随半导体设备板块盘中下跌约7%

Applied Materials ( AMAT ) dropped 7% by noon trading as the semiconductor manufacturing equipment company held its Investor Day presentation during SEMICON West in San Francisco on Tuesday. The decline occurred despite Applied Materials presenting a compelling case as to why AI drives greater demand for larger dies, more transistors, and additional wiring layers as more is required for high-end DRAM and NAND memory. In HBM packaging, Applied Materials' solutions can enable 75% of the packaging process. Meanwhile, the optical inspection market drives new revenue opportunities for the company. "We are driving profound growth in the optical inspection market," said Keith Wells, vice president of the imaging and process control group at Applied Materials. "We expect the optical wafer inspection market to reach $9B, and we expect to capture a larger share … Optical inspection has gone from a market worth a few hundred million a few years ago to a multi-billion-dollar market." The presentation occurred during a day when much of the semiconductor sector was in the red, as evidenced by the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index ( SOX ) down 2%. Other semiconductor manufacturing equipment stocks were falling as well. KLA (KLA) dropped 3.9%, Lam Research ( LRCX ) declined 3.8%, and ASML ( ASML ) fell 2.7%. On Monday, Applied Materials unveiled its $5B EPIC Center in Sunnyvale, California, a semiconductor R&D facility designed to accelerate chip innovation for AI. The 600,000-square-foot facility brings chipmakers, equipment suppliers, and university researchers together to speed up the development and commercialization of next-generation chip technologies.