TL;DR · 30-second read
The Short Version
Applied Materials, one of the biggest makers of the machines that build computer chips, is buying more of a smaller Dutch company called Besi. It will own about a fifth of it.
Besi makes machines that join separate chips together so they work as one. The most powerful artificial intelligence chips are now built this way, with stacks of memory chips placed right beside the processor.
The bet: the next big gains in speed and energy savings will come not just from making chips smaller, but from how tightly the pieces are joined.
Applied Materials (Nasdaq: AMAT) entered into an accelerated share purchase agreement on October 26, 2026 that, combined with its existing holding, would give it approximately 20% of the outstanding shares of BE Semiconductor Industries N.V. (Besi), the Amsterdam-listed maker of chip assembly equipment. In an 8-K filed the same day, Applied said delivery of the shares is subject to the expiration or termination of the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, the US antitrust pre-merger review. Applied has not disclosed the price or number of shares.
MarketScreener reported that Besi’s shares soared on the news and described the move as roughly doubling Applied’s stake, which the company first took in April 2025. Applied said it views the investment as long term, has no current intention to go beyond about 20%, and will not seek a seat on Besi’s board.
Executive Summary
The world’s largest supplier of wafer-fabrication equipment is deepening its financial tie to the leading specialist in hybrid bonding, a technique that fuses chips together copper-to-copper without solder. Applied’s announcement frames the purchase explicitly around AI: Dr. Prabu Raja, President of Applied’s Semiconductor Products Group, said hybrid bonding and next-generation interconnect architectures are becoming “increasingly critical enablers of energy-efficient AI compute performance.”
The collaboration, which began in 2020, is also widening. Besi has joined Applied’s EPIC Center as an Innovation Partner, and joint work now extends beyond hybrid bonding into 3D chip stacking, logic and memory integration, thermo-compression bonding, and die-on-wafer, die-on-die and die-on-panel platforms. That list maps closely onto how today’s AI accelerators and their high-bandwidth memory are assembled.
The structure matters as much as the size. A capped 20% stake with no board representation gives Applied a large economic interest in Besi’s success without control over a supplier that much of the industry relies on.
Why Applied Is Betting on the Bond, Not Just the Transistor
A modern AI accelerator is rarely one piece of silicon. It is a package: one or more logic dies that do the computing, surrounded by stacks of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the vertically stacked DRAM that feeds data to the processor. Performance and power draw depend heavily on how fast and how cheaply data moves between those pieces. Every connection between dies costs energy, and the number of connections that can be packed into a given area limits bandwidth.
Hybrid bonding attacks that limit directly. Instead of joining dies with tiny solder bumps, it presses two extremely flat, clean surfaces together so their copper pads fuse. That permits far denser connections at shorter distances, which is why Applied ties it specifically to “energy-efficient AI compute performance” rather than raw speed alone. The joint work list in Applied’s announcement, including logic and memory integration and next-generation 3D IC scaling, is a description of exactly this problem: getting memory and compute closer together.
Who feels this first: chipmakers designing multi-die AI processors, memory makers moving toward taller HBM stacks, and the packaging operations that assemble them. A front-end toolmaker taking a fifth of the leading bonding specialist is a strong signal that Applied expects interconnect density to be a gating factor in AI chip roadmaps, and that it wants a stake in whichever tools solve it.
Front-End Precision Meets Back-End Placement
The pairing makes technical sense. Hybrid bonding blurs the old line between front-end fabrication, where Applied built its business in deposition, etching and polishing, and back-end assembly, where Besi specialises in placing dies with high accuracy. A bond only works if surfaces are polished nearly atomically flat and kept free of particles, which are front-end disciplines, and if dies are then aligned and placed precisely, which is Besi’s.
Notably, the collaboration also covers the scaling of thermo-compression bonding, the incumbent method that uses heat and pressure on micro-bumps. That reads as a hedge on timing: the partners are positioned for the current generation of stacked memory and logic as well as the hybrid-bonded generation Applied describes as increasingly critical. Adding die-on-panel integration, which uses large rectangular panels instead of round wafers, extends the bet to a format the industry is exploring to fit more silicon into a single package.
A Stake, Not a Takeover
Applied was explicit on limits: approximately 20%, no current intention to go higher, no board seat, a long-term view. That restraint is meaningful. Besi sells to chipmakers and packaging houses that compete with one another, and equipment buyers tend to value suppliers that remain independent. A minority position without governance rights lets Applied share in Besi’s upside and coordinate engineering closely while Besi continues to sell to the whole market.
The mechanics add one caveat. Under an accelerated share purchase agreement, shares are acquired on a compressed timetable, but delivery here waits on the Hart-Scott-Rodino review. Until that clears, the agreement is signed but the stake is not yet delivered. Investors’ reaction suggests the market reads the move as validation of Besi’s technology position, though Applied’s statements stop short of any commercial commitment such as joint product revenue or guaranteed orders.
Background
Applied Materials, based in Santa Clara, California, is a leading supplier of the equipment used to make chips on silicon wafers, including tools for depositing, etching and polishing thin layers of material. As AI chips have shifted from single large dies to packages that combine several dies with stacked memory, advanced packaging has become a growing focus for front-end toolmakers.
Besi, headquartered in the Netherlands, built its business on die attach and packaging equipment and has become closely associated with hybrid bonding. The two companies began collaborating in 2020, Applied took an initial equity stake in April 2025, and Besi has since joined Applied’s EPIC Center as an Innovation Partner. Source: Dutch chip tool maker Besi soars after Applied Materials moves to double stake and Applied Materials wants to raise its stake in BESI to 20% to strengthen partnership (MarketScreener), covering Applied’s move to lift its Besi holding and the market reaction. Primary sources: Applied Materials Form 8-K filed October 26, 2026; Exhibit 99.1: Applied Materials to Increase its Strategic Investment in BE Semiconductor Industries.Sources