Daily Update - August 14th, 2026

Applied Materials Q3 revenue hit $9.12B (+25% YoY), SMIC topped $3B quarterly for the first time, SanDisk targets mid-to-high-teens NAND growth through 2030, Anthropic eyes $6B Decart buy.

Hello world, it’s Friday, August 14th.

Applied Materials posted record quarterly revenue of $9.12 billion, up 25 percent year over year, with non-GAAP EPS climbing 41 percent to $3.50. SanDisk projected mid-to-high-teens revenue growth from FY2028 through FY2030, SMIC crossed $3 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time, and Anthropic is reportedly in talks to acquire Nvidia-backed Decart AI for $6 billion.

Let’s get into it. — Austin & Vik

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Applied Materials Posts Record Quarter as Equipment Cycle Broadens

Applied Materials reported record revenue of $9.12 billion for its third quarter of 2026, up 25 percent year over year, with non-GAAP EPS climbing 41 percent to $3.50. The company’s EPIC Center R&D partnerships expanded to 11 engagements, even as shares slipped after the guidance cleared a bar that the market had already priced in. Reuters noted that the forecast came in above analyst estimates but investors sold the news, a familiar dynamic when expectations run ahead of results.

Lam Research added ballast to the cycle by committing to invest more than $3 billion to expand its global lab network, framing the move explicitly around AI-era innovation velocity. Korean supplier ISTE provided a ground-level read on the same trend: the company posted record quarterly revenue of approximately 16.85 billion won, a 401 percent jump from a year earlier, with operating profit turning positive at 2.07 billion won.

Vik: WFE equipment vendors have visibility into 8-quarter rolling window as customers providers provide roadmaps out to 2030. This is unusual for this industry, which usually looks ahead only 2-3 quarters. The demand for semiconductors remain strong.

A note on ISTE and what they do: they provide cleaning materials for front opening unified pods (FOUPs), specifically for HBM. These FOUPs are extremely clean “boxes” that transport wafers between machines in a fab on ceiling mounted rails. And they do need internal cleaning. I find it interesting how far down the AI supply chain goes.

Austin: The 8-quarter window exists so everyone downstream has time to add capacity. Applied’s CFO Brice Hill said the company is “systematically translating our 8-quarter customer demand forecast into a consolidated signal to our suppliers,” and that Applied has on the order of 2,000 direct suppliers!!! No wonder they need two years.

Asked whether the visibility is shifting order patterns, prepayments or pricing, Hill said deposits exist but “not across the board”, pricing runs as 2 to 3 year project contracts that move “relatively slowly”, and there’s “no change in the overall model.”

This is in contrast to substrates. Ibiden’s ¥500 billion expansion is customer-funded, its stated policy being to “receive an amount equivalent to the investment as an advance payment”.

So when Intel says it’s “actively securing supply of substrates and memory”, securing can mean funding the plant, not just placing an order. Not the same when Intel says it’s “aggressively locking in tool purchase orders”. It might seem like substrate makers have more power than tool vendors if they can ask customers to prepay, but I think it’s the opposite; putting more financial risk on the customers like this isn’t great and comes at a cost, I’d rather be AMAT and not need to do this to my customers.

SanDisk Investor Day Bets on NAND Boom Through Decade’s End

At its 2026 Investor Day, SanDisk laid out a financial model projecting mid-to-high-teens revenue growth from FY2028 through FY2030, anchored by what the company described as a leading NAND technology roadmap and durable customer partnerships. The plan goes further than growth targets alone: SanDisk committed to returning 100 percent of excess cash to shareholders after capital investment, a pledge that landed well with investors already watching memory prices climb. Asian memory chipmakers rose on the back of the SanDisk presentation, with Bloomberg reporting the outlook lifted broader confidence across the sector.

See the full investor day 98-slide presentation here.

Vik: Their BiCS 10 platform is the newest and is 332-layer 2Tb QLC NAND. What is really interesting is their HBF roadmap. I recommend you go look at like slide 83 onwards. There is some really interesting stuff there like this chart of potential use cases.

Chinese Foundries and CXMT Post Records as Domestic Chip Stack Takes Shape

SMIC, China’s largest contract chipmaker, posted its first-ever quarterly revenue above $3 billion in Q2 2026, with net profit jumping 261.7 percent year on year to $479.2 million on surging orders for mature-node chips used alongside AI processors. Demand ran so far ahead of forecasts that management is now actively evaluating additional equipment installations across its fabs, and the company has begun raising wafer prices as capacity tightens. Smaller rival Hua Hong Grace saw first-half net profit surge 404 percent to $59.5 million; Digitimes attributed the swing largely to pricing power, noting its fabs were already running full before rates moved.

CXMT, the domestic DRAM maker, overtook Tencent to become China’s most valuable listed company just 17 days after its IPO, reaching a market cap of $524 billion. Korean media reported that CXMT’s latest DRAM yield rate trails Samsung’s by only two percentage points, a claim that, if accurate, narrows the technology gap considerably.

Behind the demand:

• China’s AI chip market is approaching 90 percent domestic share in 2026, with Huawei on course to displace Nvidia as the leading supplier, according to Digitimes.

• CXMT’s market capitalization now rivals Intel’s, according to Business Insider.

Austin: A sign of the times! It’s like the mid 2020s (AI + semis) overtaking the mid 2010s (social and gaming). I’m here for it.

Vik: The rise of CXMT is incredible, and we continue to track it here on Semi Doped Daily!

Anthropic Pursues Decart Acquisition

Anthropic is in talks to acquire Nvidia-backed Decart AI for $6 billion, according to Bloomberg, a deal that would add inference-focused model capability to the company’s portfolio as it prepares for a public listing. Decart, whose backers include Nvidia, has drawn Anthropic’s interest partly because of its work on fast, efficient inference infrastructure. The acquisition talks arrive as Anthropic separately targets 77% gross margins before its IPO, a threshold that would make the financial story considerably cleaner for prospective public investors. The company has set its sights on what would be a $2 trillion IPO valuation, which would set a record if achieved.

Vik: We noted on May 19th, 2026 that Decart is incredibly cool, and that you should probably be using it to impersonate your boss’s boss. Glad Anthropic sees the value in this startup!

Austin: I wrote about a neat Decart and Etched collab back in November 2024. Here we are two years later and folks are taking these companies seriously. I was early 🫡

Sector Watch

Memory

• SK Hynix sets August 27 groundbreaking for its advanced packaging facility in Indiana, with SK Group Chairman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang expected to attend. (The Elec)

• Kioxia eyes customer trials for a PCIe Gen6 optical SSD, targeting storage interface bandwidth beyond current electrical-interconnect limits. (digitimes)

Foundry & Packaging

• Samsung Electro-Mechanics delays semiconductor glass substrate mass production to beyond 2028, a slip that pushes back a key next-generation packaging enabling technology. (digitimes)

• Rapidus targets 8-reticle interposers by 2030, expanding its advanced packaging ambitions beyond 2nm logic as Japan’s national chip strategy widens in scope. (digitimes)

• TSMC expands advanced packaging outsourcing, boosting orders for Korean post-processing equipment makers as CoWoS demand accelerates. (아시아경제)

Compute

• AMD raises as much as $5 billion from a debt offering to fund its accelerating AI accelerator and data center chip push. (Bloomberg.com)

• Blaize reported Q2 2026 financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2026. (Blaize)

• Cerebras raises its 2026 full-year outlook even as hardware sales soften, shifting revenue mix toward inference services. (digitimes)

Data Centers

• Nebius leases capacity from Vantage in Newport, Wales and announces a second Finland site, broadening its European GPU cloud footprint. (Data Center Dynamics)

• Vantage Data Centers explores an IPO at a $100 billion valuation or an outright sale, per Reuters reporting. (Reuters)

• L&T secures a mega order to deploy 10,000 Nvidia B300 GPUs for Together AI in Chennai, India’s largest single-cluster AI factory. (The Times of India)

Optics & Networking

• Sivers Semiconductors and SemiNex launch a $3.4 million program to develop InP light sources targeting AI data center interconnects. (EE News Europe)

• ZJ InnoLight subsidiary acquires a stake in PCB giant Avary Holding, vertically integrating the optical transceiver supply chain toward substrate-level components. (TrendForce)

• Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia back an 800V DC power standard for AI data centers, targeting rack-level efficiency at scale. (Network World)