Applied Materials, founded 1967, is a world-leading provider of tools and software to the semiconductor industry, including metrology equipment, etching and photolithography systems and chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP) technology. Applied Materials have 35,700 employees across 24 countries and have over 46,000 systems operating in over 1000 fabs.

The company offers a broad range of process technology and metrology systems, and its investments in digital infrastructure combine sensors, machine learning, simulation, metrology and data science to shorten product development cycles and optimize yield. The company offers metrology and review systems for front endof-line and back end-of-line applications such as eBeam, Mask and Optical inspection systems as well as critical dimension (CD) metrology. In 2025, the company released its new SEMVision™ H20 system, combining the most sensitive eBeam with Ai image recognition for more advanced analysis of buried defects on advanced chips.

Acquisitions

In 2025, Applied Materials purchased 9 percent of the outstanding shares of the common stock of BE Semiconductor Industries N.V. (Besi), a leading manufacturer of semiconductor equipment. This transaction follows collaboration between the two companies since 2020, developing the industry’s first fully integrated equipment solution for die-based hybrid bonding. The technology connects chips using direct copper-to-copper bonds, which increases density and shortens the lengths of interconnect wiring between chiplets, resulting in improved overall performance, power consumption and cost.

Sustainability and Talent

In 2023, Applied Materials achieved 100% renewable electricity in the US, and aim to achieve this globally by 2030. In 2023, the company also reduced its total water withdrawal by 12%. The Sustainability Systems Center of Excellence supports the product engineering design teams in developing more sustainable technologies products and processes, with 24 eco-focused products and services in its current portfolio, alongside over 20 upgrades for existing products to make customers increase sustainability.

The company also announced in 2023 an investment to build the world’s largest and most advanced facility for collaborative semiconductor process technology and manufacturing equipment R&D on an applied Silicon Valley campus. Applied Materials plans to make incremental capital investments of up to $4 billion between 2023 and 2030, and construction of the centre is expected to be completed in 2026. The centre should vastly reduce the time it takes to bring new innovations to the market, and strengthen the university pipeline for future talent, providing students with opportunities to conduct research on the site, and in a planned network of industrial-quality satellite labs at university facilities.