LAM Research (LRCX): Las herramientas que impulsan el auge de los chips de IA

Por qué los semiconductores son el nuevo ‘petróleo’ de la economía digital

Nearly every electronic device today utilizes some semiconductor components. From washing machines to cars to computers and phones, virtually every manufactured device or machine contains a chip or an electronic board of some sort.

Esto convierte a los semiconductores en uno de los insumos más importantes de la economía moderna. Y en una preocupación estratégica para las grandes potencias, como lo ilustra la importancia de Taiwán en la rivalidad EE. UU.-China.

El mercado de semiconductores creció en sucesivas olas, impulsado primero por las computadoras, luego por Internet, después por la nube y los smartphones, y ahora por la IA y el IoT (Internet de las cosas).

Fuente: Applied Materials

One way to invest in the semiconductor industry is with companies producing the chips, like TSMC (TSM ) or Intel (INTC ) (follow the links for a detailed report on each of these companies).

Acciones de pick‑and‑shovel de semiconductores

Another way is to invest in the company providing the equipment, materials, and machinery to the semiconductor foundries, which rely on specialized suppliers, able to provide the best and most reliable equipment to produce at-scale chips and other semiconductors.

Because semiconductor manufacturing is such an exact science, chip producers want only the best tools available. And because it is such a complex endeavor, this can only be achieved by a handful of very specialized suppliers.

As a result, a complex ecosystem emerged, with each task in the process of making a chip being achieved by a handful of ultra-specialized equipment produced sometimes by only one or two companies.

Fuente: Generative Value

This gives these equipment suppliers great pricing power and a strong economic moat. Companies like TSMC will stick to their established suppliers or risk disrupting their operations.

It also creates a positive flywheel where existing sales generate money for more R&D, which in turn guarantees that any potential new competitor would struggle to achieve the same technical results, and therefore cannot enter the market.

So, with semiconductors becoming a strategic asset, it can make sense to invest in equipment suppliers, as they will benefit from chip foundries’ build-up, no matter which chip maker (TSMC, Nvidia (NVDA ), Intel, etc.) ultimately benefits the most from growing semiconductor demand.

An important company in this sector is LAM Research, which is the leader in wafer manufacturing equipment, the basic component that is later on turned into functional computer chips and other semiconductor components.

Visión general de LAM Research

Historia de LAM Research

LAM Research was founded in 1980, built on the company’s development of better plasma etching equipment, to keep up with the rapid miniaturization of semiconductor wafers.

The company was publicly listed in 1984 and quickly expanded globally with a presence in Europe in 1985 and then Asia since the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The company hit the $1B in revenues for the first time in 1995.

Through a mix of internal R&D and acquisitions, the company became a keystone supplier of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, especially for wafer production.

Fuente: The Waves

Today, LAM Research employs 19,400+ employees and is headquartered in Fremont, California, but also has locations in South Korea, Taiwan, Austria, Malaysia, and India.

These closer locations help supply customers with parts and ultra-reactive support for repair and maintenance.

Fuente: LAM Research

Posición competitiva de LAM Research

The leadership position of the company is built on a massive technological advantage, financed by R&D as a percentage of operating expenses that has increased above 50% for more than a decade.

In total, the company spent $2.1B in R&D in 2025.

This made LAM Research one of the leaders in wafer manufacturing tools, giving it a massive scale. This scale is then, in turn, converted into a series of competitive advantages:

• Alcance global con técnicos listos para asistir en fundiciones de semiconductores cercanas, lo que genera relaciones comerciales estables.
• Costos más bajos gracias a economías de escala.
• Experiencia única que es difícil de replicar.
• Capacidad de producción avanzada para producir equipos consistentemente de alta calidad.

Fuente: LAM Research

As a result, since 2013, the revenues from the installed base of LAM Research-made equipment have grown by 10% CAGR. And the revenues from the Customer Support Business Group (CSBG) have grown by 17 % CAGR.

Productos y tecnología de LAM Research

While most semiconductor manufacturers and equipment producers have benefited from the trends of digitalization and AI, LAM Research is especially well-positioned to capture value from them.

This is in large part thanks to the company’s good technological choice, becoming an expert at the methods now required to keep increasing chips’ power to answer AI data centers’ requirements.

Fuente: LAM Research

Verticalización

An important factor in LAM Research’s good technical position is its expertise in verticalization. As semiconductors become denser, they are now being built not just on a flat 2D surface, but in 3D as well.

One example is with NAND, widely used in devices like SSDs, USB drives, and SD cards.

Fuente: LAM Research

“En NAND, la transición a dispositivos con más de 200 capas exige pasos adicionales de deposición y grabado para aplicaciones como gestión de estrés posterior, relleno de carbono y deposición de bisel.”

Newer approaches allow for much denser memory, but also dedicated equipment to manufacture them this way. LAM Research has the world’s largest NAND installed base.

Another one is DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory), used to store data in and out of the processing unit (GPUs, CPUs, etc.). Modern DRAM is also an extremely complex 3D  construct, requiring a wide array of semiconductor manufacturing technologies to be created.

Fuente: LAM Research

“La industria se está moviendo hacia 4F² y, en última instancia, arquitecturas 3D, lo que requiere un escalado vertical mayor, más capas de metal y relaciones de aspecto más altas que exigen relleno sin vacíos y grabado de precisión.

Todos los dispositivos de High Bandwidth Memory que habilitan la IA de vanguardia hoy en día se fabrican usando equipos de Lam.”

This strong presence in foundry, DRAM, and NAND is important, as these are the segments that have benefited the most from the recent boom in semiconductor demand.

Fuente: LAM Research

Metales avanzados y tecnología ALD (Molibdeno, Tungsteno)

While silicon is, of course, the core of the current semiconductor industry, other metals can supplement or replace silicon for specific tasks or requirements.

As chips are becoming increasingly sophisticated, these metals are also increasingly crucial for new designs.

LAM Research has been for 20 years the leader in semiconductor manufacturing using ALD metals (Atomic Layer Deposition) like tungsten and molybdenum.

Recently, the company has introduced a new method for depositing molybdenum, ALTUS Halo, offering a 50% reduction in resistance and usable for logic, DRAM, and NAND components.

The company is targeting $2B in shipments for this equipment, with the growth doubling what tungsten used to provide.

“La integración de la metalización de molibdeno permite a Micron ser la primera en el mercado con un ancho de banda de E/S y capacidad de almacenamiento líderes en la industria en la última generación de productos NAND. La herramienta ALTUS Halo de Lam ha hecho posible que Micron introduzca el molibdeno en la producción masiva.”

Mark Kiehlbauch – Vicepresidente Corporativo de Desarrollo de NAND. 

Demanda de semiconductores impulsada por IA (Centros de datos & HBM)

The IT industry expects a cumulative $2.5T of capital expenditure in data centers, mostly due to AI, in just the next 5 years.

These investments will require especially advanced chips, DRAM, and other semiconductor components, with twice the amount of leading-edge wafer fabrication equipment (WFE) compared to older designs from 2019.

This converts into no less than $200B in WFE, the core of LAM Research’s business, or almost the exact value of the company’s market capitalization in diciembre de 2025.

In the same way, the deposition and etch intensity are increasing for advanced chips, with 2x the amount per wafer compared to previous methods.

Fuente: LAM Research

LAM is leading when it comes to making and preparing the wafers for chips manufactured with EUV, the most advanced semiconductor lithography process in the world, itself the domain of ASML (ASML ).

Fiabilidad mejorada

As the semiconductor industry is struggling to find enough human resources, LAM is now focusing on helping its customers on this front.

Notably, it is aiming for a strict reduction in maintenance requirements:

• -30% maintenance time reduction.
• -20% in unscheduled maintenance.
• >90% of maintenance fixes the problem the first time.

Overall, these efforts have increased machine availability by 8%, which can significantly improve the operating profits of a semiconductor foundry.

“For a 100,000 wafer starts per month fab, this can represent running cost savings >$100m/year.”

Finanzas de LAM Research

LAM revenues are roughly divided 2/3^rd from foundry activity and 1/3^rd from memory production.

By far, the most important country is China, making up 43% of the company’s total revenues, followed by Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. In total, more than 80% of the company’s revenues come from Asian semiconductor foundries.

Fuente: LAM Research

The company recorded $5.3B in revenues in Q3 2025, an absolute record, thanks to the all-time high 50.6% gross margin and 35% operating margin.

Maybe more impressive, the company managed to almost multiply 10-fold its operating income and earnings per share between 2013 and 2024.

The company has steadily increased its dividends over the years, and returned almost 99% of free cash flow to its shareholders since 2013, with plans to return 85%+ of free cash flow in the near term.

Fuente: LAM Research

LAM Research y China

LAM Research has a strong exposure to China. So far, this has proven to be a great benefit for the company, as China is very actively building its semiconductor foundry capacity.

Contrary to companies like ASML, LAM Research tools are not only better, cheaper, and/or more powerful than their competitors’, but they are not a key, un-replicable technology. So contrary to ASML and its EUV machine, LAM Research is not getting caught in the crossfire of the USA-China tensions (at least so far).

This is not to say that no Chinese competitors to LAM equipment exist. But contrary to lithography or other semiconductor-related technologies, LAM is able to keep a good access into the Chinese market, inhibiting these competitors from acquiring a massive protected market in which to develop with higher margins.

So overall, as long as this situation persists, LAM will actually benefit from the duplication of foundry capacity in the Chinese market instead of suffering from the USA-China trade wars like other semiconductor equipment manufacturers.

Conclusión

LAM Research is one of the global leaders in semiconductor manufacturing, a sector where the Top 10 Companies completely dominate the market, each having a monopoly or oligopoly level of control on its own niche.

This clearly includes LAM Research when it comes to wafer production and preparation. This makes the company a good “pick-and-shovel” stock for the semiconductor industry.

Investors should, however, be aware that this is a stock with a built-in volatility due to the cyclical nature of the semiconductor market. So while we are definitely in a booming phase, they should know that cyclical ups and downs have been historically the norm in this industry.

Still, it has also been the norm that market leaders like LAM Research, ASML, TSMC, etc. have steadily aggregated value for their shareholders through a combination of technical excellence, reinforcing market share, and growth with the semiconductor industry as a whole.

So investors who take the long-term view on stocks like LAM Research have previously benefited the most, with only a few experts benefiting from trying to time the semiconductor market. Other investors’ profiles are most likely doing better off by just holding on to their compounding assets for years, if not decades.

Últimas noticias y desarrollos de acciones de LAM Research (LRCX)