Applied Materials (AMAT) – Among Billionaire Steven Cohen’s Top 11 Dividend Stock Picks - Insider Monkey

Applied Materials (AMAT) has been included among billionaire Steven Cohen’s top 11 dividend stock picks, highlighting market confidence in its long-term value. On June 26, Wells Fargo and B. Riley rai... Read original →

Cohen’s stake in Applied Materials signals more than dividend appeal—it reflects institutional repricing of semiconductor equipment as a strategic hard-tech asset. Technically, AMAT’s integrated deposition and etch capabilities at sub-3nm and advanced packaging nodes are accelerating HBM4 and chiplet adoption, subtly eroding ASML’s EUV indispensability in certain interconnect layers. On compliance, U.S. export controls raise Southeast Asia localization costs but paradoxically deepen AMAT’s service stickiness in mature-node markets across Taiwan, China and mainland China. Competitors like Lam Research may fast-track a KLA acquisition to close metrology gaps, while Tokyo Electron could leverage Japanese subsidies to counter with display equipment expansion. Over the next 18 months, as AI chip demand shifts from training to inference, capex will rebalance from leading-edge logic toward memory and packaging—positions where AMAT’s >30% services revenue provides critical cyclicality insulation.