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Wall Street sees 17% more upside in Applied Materials Stock. Here's the math. Last updated Jul 26, 2026 Key Takeaways for Applied Materials Stock as of July 2026. * Record Quarter: Applied Materials posted $7.91B in Q2 revenue, up 11% YoY, non-GAAP EPS of $2.86, up 20% YoY, and a non-GAAP gross margin of 50%, its highest level in over 25 years. * Guidance Raise: Management lifted its 2026 equipment growth guide from 20% to over 30%. * DRAM and Packaging Inflection: DRAM revenue hit $1.7B, up 18% YoY, while advanced packaging revenue is tracking toward $2B, up over 50% this year. * Capacity Signal: CEO Gary Dickerson tied the raise to customer behavior directly, telling investors: "we now expect our semiconductor equipment business will grow more than 30% this calendar year." Applied Materials Raises Its 2026 Equipment Growth Guide to Over 30%. Applied Materials (AMAT) told investors on its May 14 fiscal second-quarter call that semiconductor equipment revenue will grow more than 30% in calendar 2026, up from the 20% growth outlook it had given previously. The upgrade came alongside record fiscal Q2 revenue of $7.91 billion, up 13% sequentially and 11% year over year, and the company's highest gross margin in more than 25 years. The raise wasn't a rounding change. CEO Gary Dickerson tied it directly to DRAM and advanced packaging, the two markets where Applied has been building share for years. At the June 26 Master Class, Kevin Moraes laid out the scale: advanced packaging revenue is projected to grow more than 50% in 2026 to over $2 billion, after already tripling between 2020 and 2024 against a prior forecast of doubling. DRAM revenue hit $1.7 billion in fiscal Q2, up 18% year over year, with Applied holding roughly 10 points of share gained in that market since 2013. Dickerson framed the shift on the earnings call this way: "As customers find new ways to reallocate or create space, we are seeing incremental requests for equipment deliveries in 2026, and we now expect our semiconductor equipment business will grow more than 30% this calendar year." That single sentence moved the growth algorithm for the stock. It wasn't a demand story anymore, it was a capacity-unlock story, with customers physically finding cleanroom space faster than Applied had modeled. The Q2 beat wasn't just a revenue story: Applied Materials topped Street EBIT estimates by 6% with $2.54 billion in operating income and 32% operating margin, and that operating-line beat is exactly what management pointed to when it raised the 2026 systems growth guide, giving the 30%-plus outlook a profitability anchor, not just a bookings one. The EPIC collaboration platform backs that claim with names, not adjectives. TSMC, Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix signed on as founding partners, and Broadcom joined specifically for advanced packaging work just before the June 26 call. Applied is also 100-plus factory projects deep in its customer pipeline, more than 10 of them added in the most recent quarter alone. This is the development repricing Applied Materials stock: a raised, dated growth guide backed by named customer commitments in the two markets carrying the highest materials intensity in the industry. Applied Materials Stock Sits 26% Below Its Highs Despite the Guidance Raise. Applied Materials stock hit a maximum drawdown of 27% on July 20, 2026, and still traded 26% below its peak as of the most recent close. The stock fell another 5% on July 24 alone, closing at $536 That drop came after the company had already told investors its equipment business would grow faster than previously guided, not slower, a disconnect that puts the drawdown squarely at odds with the fundamental story from Section 1. Wall Street hasn't backed off the name during the selloff. Of 35 analysts covering Applied Materials stock, 28 rate it a buy and 4 rate it outperform, 6 hold it, and just 1 rates it underperform, with no sell ratings on the stock. The mean price target sits at $628, which puts the stock's target-to-close ratio at 117%, meaning the Street collectively sees roughly 17% upside from current levels even before accounting for the raised 2026 growth guide. TIKR Values Applied Materials Stock at $669, Pricing In the DRAM and Packaging Ramp. TIKR's mid-case model values Applied Materials stock at $669 by October 2030, implying a 25% total return from the current price of $536, or 5% annualized over 4.3 years. That annualized return trails the kind of multi-bagger math some AI infrastructure names have put up, but it comes from a company already generating record gross margins near 50% at the corporate level and 55% within Semiconductor Systems. It's a return built on execution, not multiple expansion. The target is reachable because the growth math from Section 1 is already showing up in the numbers, not just the guidance. Semiconductor Systems revenue hit a record $5.97 billion in fiscal Q2, DRAM grew 18% year over year, and advanced packaging is tracking toward that $2 billion-plus, 50%-growth year. A 30%-plus equipment growth guide sitting on top of an already-record quarter is the kind of gap between guidance and price that tends to close. Should You Invest in Applied Materials, Inc.? The only way to really know is to look at the numbers yourself. TIKR gives you free access to the same institutional-quality financial data that professional analysts use to answer exactly that question. Pull up Applied Materials, Inc. stock and you'll see years of historical financials, what Wall Street analysts expect for revenue and earnings in the quarters ahead, how valuation multiples have moved over time, and whether price targets are trending up or down. You can build a free watchlist to track Applied Materials, Inc. stock alongside every other stock on your radar. No credit card required. Just the data you need to decide for yourself. Looking for New Opportunities? * See what stocks billionaire investors are buying so you can follow the smart money. * Analyze stocks in as little as 5 minutes with TIKR's all-in-one, easy-to-use platform. * The more rocks you overturn... the more opportunities you'll uncover. Search 100K+ global stocks, global top investor holdings, and more with TIKR. Disclaimer: Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or its content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. TIKR create its content based on TIKR Terminal's investment data and analysts' estimates. Its analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing! Table of Contents * Key Takeaways for Applied Materials Stock as of July 2026 * Applied Materials Raises Its 2026 Equipment Growth Guide to Over 30% * Applied Materials Stock Sits 26% Below Its Highs Despite the Guidance Raise * TIKR Values Applied Materials Stock at $669, Pricing In the DRAM and Packaging Ramp * Should You Invest in Applied Materials, Inc.? * Looking for New Opportunities? * Disclaimer: Stock Reviews Earnings Updates Join thousands of investors worldwide who use TIKR to supercharge their investment analysis.

CuspAI: $450M Series B at $2.6B valuation for AI Materials discovery. Kleiner Perkins and NEA co-led a round that took CuspAI from $520M to $2.6B in ten months, with Jeff Bezos and John Doerr writing personal checks into a startup that wants to replace lab trial-and-error with AI-designed materials. Co-Founder & GP at Six Point Ventures · 3x founder (BrandYourself, Launch.it, SPOT) · 65+ investments · Based in Boca Raton, FL 65+Investments 3xFounder $200M+Funds Tracked Quick Answer CuspAI, a Cambridge, UK-based AI materials discovery startup, raised a $450 million Series B at a $2.6 billion valuation, co-led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA with participation from Bezos Expeditions, Lux Capital, and AMD Ventures. The round is a roughly 5x markup from the $520 million valuation CuspAI held after its Series A just ten months earlier, in September 2025. CuspAI raised $450 million at a $2.6 billion valuation, co-led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA with Jeff Bezos's family office writing a check alongside John Doerr. That's the short answer. The longer answer is more interesting. A Cambridge, UK company that helps discover new materials - the kind that go into chips, batteries, and industrial coatings - just went from a $520 million valuation to $2.6 billion in ten months, without a product category most people have heard of. This isn't a chatbot, an agent framework, or a coding tool. It's AI applied to one of the slowest, most trial-and-error-heavy fields in industrial science, and the capital markets just priced it like the next foundation model company. CuspAI $450M Series B: round terms and lead investors. CuspAI closed a $450 million Series B on July 21, 2026, co-led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA at a $2.6 billion post-money valuation. Bezos Expeditions, Lux Capital, AMD Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, Tru Arrow Partners, StepStone, and Britain's Sovereign AI Venture Fund all participated, alongside angel investor John Doerr. co-led by Kleiner Perkins, NEA Series B raised up from $520M in Sep 2025 New valuation in roughly 10 months Valuation multiple incl. NVIDIA, Meta, Samsung, AMD Foundry partners Figures from TechFundingNews, SiliconANGLE, and Pulse2 reporting on CuspAI's Series B announcement, July 21, 2026. What CuspAI actually builds. CuspAI's pitch is that materials science still runs on a discovery process that hasn't fundamentally changed in decades: a researcher hypothesizes a compound, synthesizes it, tests it, and iterates - often across years and thousands of failed candidates - before landing on something that works. CuspAI's models simulate the mechanical, thermal, and electronic properties of candidate materials computationally first, narrowing an enormous search space down to the handful of candidates actually worth synthesizing in a lab. The commercial product is called the AI Materials Foundry, and CuspAI says it now has more than 45 partners feeding real-world problems and validation data into the platform, including NVIDIA, Meta, Samsung, Hyundai Motor Group, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, and Lam Research. That partner list is the tell: this is squarely aimed at the semiconductor and advanced-manufacturing supply chain, where a single better dielectric, coating, or thermal interface material can be worth billions in yield and performance gains across an entire fab. From $520M to $2.6B in ten months. CuspAI's funding history is a clean case study in how fast AI-for-science valuations are compounding right now. The company raised a $30 million seed in June 2024, then a Series A of just over $100 million in September 2025 - co-led by NEA and Temasek, with NVIDIA's NVentures and Samsung Ventures both already in the cap table - that valued the company at $520 million. Ten months later, the Series B put a $2.6 billion price tag on the same business. Total capital raised across all three rounds is now roughly $580 million. That's a company that's raised more money in the last ten months than most Series C SaaS companies raise across an entire lifecycle, backing a product category - AI-designed materials - that barely existed as a venture thesis three years ago. Why Bezos and Kleiner Perkins are both in this deal. Jeff Bezos's family office, Bezos Expeditions, has been on an aggressive run backing physical-world AI companies through 2026 - it co-led Prometheus's $12 billion round at a $41 billion valuation and put capital into Flourish's $500 million round earlier this year. CuspAI fits the same thesis: AI applied to atoms, not just tokens, in categories with genuine physical-world moats rather than a thin wrapper around a foundation model API. For Kleiner Perkins and John Doerr specifically, materials discovery is also a chip-supply-chain bet. As the AI buildout runs into physical bottlenecks - advanced packaging, thermal management, next-generation dielectrics - the firms funding the compute layer have obvious reasons to also fund the materials layer that determines how fast that compute layer can actually scale. CuspAI vs. the AI-for-science funding wave, side by side. CuspAI isn't raising in a vacuum. It's part of a broader wave of large, fast rounds for AI applied to physical science and hard infrastructure that's defined mid-2026 dealmaking. | Company | Round | Valuation | Focus | | CuspAI | $450M Series B | $2.6B | AI materials discovery | | ICEYE | $450M Series F | $10B | Sovereign space intelligence | | Proxima Fusion | $411M | $2.4B | Fusion energy | | Crusoe | $3B round | $30B | AI data centers | | Humanoid | $152M Series A | $1.35B | Industrial humanoid robots | Figures from TechFundingNews, Forbes, and company announcements as of July 22, 2026. Is a $2.6B valuation justified, or is this multiple expansion again? CuspAI doesn't disclose revenue, and a company this early rarely has ARR that comes close to justifying a $2.6 billion price tag on fundamentals alone. What it does have is a partner list that reads like a who's-who of chipmaking and advanced manufacturing, and a lead investor bench - Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Bezos Expeditions, AMD Ventures - that's betting the partnerships convert into paid enterprise contracts faster than the typical deep-tech company. That's the same dynamic Valueaddvc has tracked across the broader AI market all year: valuations are increasingly priced on distribution and strategic partnerships rather than trailing revenue, which is exactly the multiple expansion dynamic now showing up in categories well outside large language models. Materials science AI is a genuinely hard, capital-intensive problem with real physical-world validation cycles - but a 5x markup in ten months means the market is pricing in a lot of future contract conversion that hasn't happened yet. Bottom line: CuspAI's $450 million Series B at a $2.6 billion valuation is less a story about one Cambridge startup and more a signal about where large-check AI capital is flowing next - out of pure LLM plays and into AI applied to physical-world bottlenecks like materials, energy, and manufacturing. A 45-plus partner list including NVIDIA, Meta, Samsung, and three of the biggest names in chip fabrication gives the round real strategic logic. Whether the $2.6 billion price holds depends on how many of those partnerships turn into paying, recurring enterprise contracts before the next markup comes due. Get VC data most people never see - free. Weekly benchmarks, valuations, and fund data. No spam, unsubscribe anytime. Frequently asked questions. How much did CuspAI raise in its Series B? What is CuspAI's valuation after the Series B? What does CuspAI actually do? Who founded CuspAI?