AI Demand Just Handed China's Chip Equipment Makers the Pricing Power That Sanctions Couldn't

As Pandaily first reported, the three-decade structural rule of semiconductor equipment — where TSMC, Samsung, and Intel dictated pricing and delivery terms to vendors — has inverted. AI-driven demand has turned ASML, Applied Materials, and Tokyo Electron into sellers with leverage for the first time in the industry's history. ASML now carries 18-month-plus lead times on EUV systems and has raised prices on its NXE:3800E platform without customer resistance.

The driver is a specific demand chain: TSMC's CoWoS advanced packaging buildout and insatiable HBM memory orders from SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron, all flowing into AI accelerator production that cannot slow down. Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron report the same pricing dynamics in deposition and etch tooling for HBM stacking — capacity that cannot be built fast enough regardless of cost.

For China, the consequence is structural acceleration of domestic substitution. U.S. export controls since October 2022 cut Chinese fabs off from advanced Western tooling. In a normal buyer's market, fabs absorb that constraint and wait for conditions to change. In today's seller's market, there is no slack and no alternative: Naura Technology and AMEC hold a captive market, and they are pricing accordingly. Naura's 2025 revenue exceeded 30 billion yuan, more than triple its 2022 level. A decade of Chinese industrial policy aimed at chip-equipment localization produced incremental results; 18 months of AI demand finished the job.

Read the full story at Pandaily