Applied Materials has agreed to roughly double its stake in BE Semiconductor Industries to about 20 percent, moving from minority partner to dominant outside shareholder in the Dutch company making the tools that bond chips directly to one another.
The purchase runs through an accelerated share purchase agreement and needs US antitrust clearance. Applied Materials said it will not seek a board seat – a signal it wants influence over the roadmap without formally controlling a supplier it partly competes against.
What hybrid bonding does
The technique joins copper interconnects and dielectric layers directly, without the solder bumps that have connected chips for decades. Removing the bump lets designers place connections far more densely, which is why memory makers and logic foundries both see it as the route to stacking DRAM or cache on processors.
The two firms have worked together since 2020 and jointly developed Kinex, a die-to-wafer bonding system. Besi’s flagship Datacon 8800 CHAMEO ultra plus claims alignment accuracy of 100 nanometres at up to 2,000 cycles an hour.
The stake increase answers the bear case around Besi. Adoption of hybrid bonding in memory manufacturing has slipped, and investors have worried the Dutch firm’s lead would erode as larger vendors built rival tools. Chief executive Richard Blickman has dismissed both concerns.
For Applied Materials the logic is defensive as much as financial. Its deposition and etch franchise grows slowly at mature nodes, while the packaging steps are exactly where the AI bill of materials expands fastest – and where it has been weakest. Buying a fifth of the leading supplier is cheaper than building that position organically.
The antitrust review is the open question. The two overlap in some die-level inspection and assembly steps, and Washington has grown less tolerant of tool-vendor consolidation recently.
