AEX Rises: ASML and BESI Win 4% as AI Rally Gets New Life
The global stock markets are rising after new Micron figures and also in the Netherlands. ASML and BESI benefit from the renewed AI rally.
Dutch stocks started the new trading day very strongly today. Like the rest of the world, the AEX turns beautifully green, and that is entirely thanks to the American chipmaker Micron. The company's record figures, already called the new Nvidia by some, push ASML and BESI up as much as 5 percent.
The AEX is 0.75 percent in the plus at 1,073 points. The index thus recovers from two red days, in which a total of 2 percent evaporated.
For a new record, there has to be a step up. The indicator needs an increase of 1.76 percent to match last week's highest level on Monday.
The biggest seasonings are in the chip corner. ASML is 4.15 percent higher at 1,622 euros and even touched 1,636 euros for a moment. BESI takes it up a notch with an increase of 4.57 percent and climbed to 308 euros, with an outlier of up to 310 euros.
The spark comes from the United States. Chipmaker Micron came up with numbers last night that swept away doubts about the AI boom.
Revenue skyrocketed by nearly 350 percent to $41.5 billion, and profits were nearly fifteen times the size of a year earlier. For the current quarter, the company is even aiming for $50 billion.
Micron makes memory chips, the working memory with which AI systems process huge amounts of data. Customers are now putting billions of dollars forward to secure delivery.
To put the numbers in perspective: Micron now earns about the same as chip giant Nvidia a year ago, while it's only worth a quarter on the stock market. Nvidia then stood at about $4 trillion, Micron now at about $1 trillion.
On Tuesday, we again saw doubts that the AI rally had gone too far. Since chip and tech stocks now carry a large part of the stock market, this immediately causes a major massacre.
Micron's numbers and outlook are a confirmation that the appetite for AI hardware is far from being satisfied. The share has risen by more than 16 percent in the forex market and benefited the rest of the world.
In Asia, the South Korean Kospi jumped more than 5 percent and the US Nasdaq 100 rose by more than 2 percent.
This afternoon at 2:30 pm, an exciting moment awaits with the publication of the PCE price index, the US central bank's favourite inflation meter. Are policymakers reassured, or is the fear of higher interest rates only increasing?
ASML and BESI do not make chips themselves, but the machines with which chips are made. So more demand for AI memory means more demand for their equipment.
ASML supplies the lithography machines, the hazards that etch the smallest circuits on a chip. No advanced AI chips without those machines.
BESI specializes in hybrid bonding, a technique for stacking chips tiny on top of each other. It is precisely this method that is crucial for the fast memory that Micron and competitors run on.
If the memory market is running at full speed, both Dutch suppliers will benefit. And you can see that on the course board today.