Applied Materials (NASDAQ:AMAT) President and CEO Gary Dickerson said artificial intelligence is creating what he views as the semiconductor industry’s most consequential growth inflection, driving demand for new computing architectures, memory technologies and advanced packaging.
Speaking at The Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed 2026, Dickerson said AI’s impact will extend beyond software applications and data centers, reshaping how semiconductor equipment makers develop products, serve customers and commercialize new chip technologies.
AI-Driven Demand Across Chip Manufacturing
Dickerson said Applied Materials is using AI internally in product development, operations, supply chain management and services. He emphasized that the company’s goal is not primarily to reduce headcount, but to accelerate products and services to market and support revenue growth.
He said the company is introducing products this year that it would not have been able to bring to market without AI. Applied’s service business, meanwhile, is growing at a 20% compound annual growth rate, according to Dickerson.
On semiconductor demand, Dickerson said the current AI cycle is more pervasive than prior technology transitions, including the shift from mainframes to personal computers and the mobile-computing boom. He said demand is being supported not only by people using computing resources but also by AI agents consuming compute capacity.
“The compute demand is going to keep going up,” Dickerson said, pointing to data-center workloads as well as emerging edge-AI applications. He said the economics of AI adoption are compelling enough to support continued demand across industries.
In wafer-fab equipment, about 80% of growth this year is tied to AI-driven areas, including advanced logic, memory such as high-bandwidth memory, and advanced packaging, he said. Dickerson also said Applied Materials holds the No. 1 position in each of those segments.
Memory, Packaging and Materials Innovation
Dickerson said the industry’s focus is increasingly on improving “tokens per second per watt” and lowering the cost per token. Achieving those goals will require innovation across the technology stack rather than merely producing more chips, he said.
He highlighted several areas of development:
- Advanced logic technologies designed to process more data.
- Faster memory and high-bandwidth memory technologies intended to move data on and off chips more quickly.
- Stacked memory approaches aimed at placing chips closer together to improve speed and reduce power consumption.
- Advanced packaging technologies that connect multiple computing components and influence performance, power and cost.
Applied Materials’ advanced-packaging business is growing by more than 50% this year, Dickerson said. He added that an advanced package next year could contain more than 300 chips, more than 500 billion transistors and more than 2,000 miles of wiring.
Material science will be central to enabling these new architectures, according to Dickerson. He said the company is developing materials as thin as one or two nanometers and controlling them within an angstrom, or one-tenth of a nanometer.
EPIC Center Investment Targets Faster Commercialization
Dickerson discussed Applied Materials’ $5 billion investment in its EPIC Center in Silicon Valley, describing it as an effort to bring together the company, customers, customers’ customers and supply-chain partners to speed the development and commercialization of semiconductor technologies.
Rather than pursuing innovation through a sequential process from materials to systems, the facility is intended to support earlier and closer collaboration among technology partners, he said. Dickerson called the approach “high-velocity co-innovation.”
The objective is not simply to introduce new architectures first, he said, but to ramp them at high yields, with reliability and competitive costs. “If you don’t have those three things, cost doesn’t matter,” Dickerson said, referring to performance, yield and reliability.
Dickerson said the center is intended to help partners bring architectures to market faster, secure design wins and give Applied Materials greater visibility into technology needs across multiple future nodes. That visibility, he said, can help the company determine where to direct research-and-development investment.
“We have to innovate the way we innovate, or we will not accomplish what we could accomplish together,” Dickerson said. He added that the company is seeing strong interest from ecosystem partners in collaborating on AI-focused computing technologies.
About Applied Materials (NASDAQ:AMAT)
Applied Materials, Inc is a U.S.-based supplier of equipment, services and software used to manufacture semiconductor chips, flat panel displays and other advanced materials. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, the company designs and sells capital equipment and related technologies that enable production of integrated circuits, display panels and materials used across the electronics supply chain.
Applied Materials’ offerings include process equipment and factory software that support critical steps in device fabrication, such as deposition, etch, implantation, inspection and metrology, as well as systems for packaging and advanced heterogeneous integration.
