Artisan Focus Fund on Applied Materials, Inc.
Thesis
Applied Materials is part of Artisan's Compute Infrastructure theme and was a meaningful contributor in Q2. The fund believes the current AI investment cycle is much larger than the digital-infrastructure opportunity it originally targeted in 2020. Rising hyperscaler investment is creating demand across semiconductor manufacturing, compute, power and cooling. Applied Materials gives the portfolio exposure to the equipment layer required to expand semiconductor capacity.
“Taiwan Semiconductor, Applied Materials, Analog Devices, NVIDIA, Astera Labs and Seagate contributed meaningfully as part of our Compute Infrastructure theme.”