Applied Materials Posts $10.41B Quarter as AI Demand Lifts Orders

Applied Materials booked $10.41 billion in fiscal fourth-quarter revenue, up 53% year over year and above the $10.3 billion consensus, as AI-driven semiconductor demand kept its order books full.

The Santa Clara-based equipment maker, a key supplier of deposition and etch tools to fabs worldwide, reported results and guidance after the bell on Thursday. Free cash flow reached $2.6 billion, and the company returned $2.4 billion to shareholders, including its largest quarterly share buyback in more than eight years, according to its own release.

CEO Gary Dickerson tied the growth directly to the AI buildout. He said AI continues to fuel "strong incremental demand for semiconductors," a claim that matches the reported revenue figure but which the company did not break down by end market in the source material.

What does the guidance say about the cycle?

For the fiscal first quarter, Applied Materials expects earnings per share of $4.15 to $4.55. The $4.35 midpoint sits above the $4.24 analyst forecast. Revenue guidance of $10.6 billion to $11.6 billion carries an $11.1 billion midpoint, ahead of the $10.85 billion consensus.

The midpoint beats are modest, roughly 2.3% on earnings and 2.6% on revenue. That suggests steady demand rather than a sharp inflection. The company offered no segment detail, no China revenue split and no book-to-bill figure in the reported material, so investors cannot yet judge whether the strength is broad-based or concentrated among a few leading-edge customers.

How serious is the Microsoft outage?

Separately, a major Microsoft outage that began Thursday was still unresolved Friday, affecting Copilot, Outlook, Teams and a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with Exchange Online and email services, Microsoft said in an update.

More than 130,000 users on the outage tracker Downdetector reported problems accessing Outlook earlier on Thursday. Microsoft said it saw no indication of malicious activity and is using "a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure," pledging to treat the incident "with urgency and priority until full resolution."

The company's own posts on X showed engineers struggling to contain the problem. Hours after declaring service restored, Microsoft said it had updated its list of impacted services. "We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected," the company said. The stock fell more than 2% in premarket trading.

Is Anthropic's IPO really on track to be the biggest ever?

Anthropic's initial public offering is about six times oversubscribed, Bloomberg reports. The AI company seeks to raise as much as $64.4 billion in the IPO plus $26 billion in a private placement, which would make it the biggest listing ever, surpassing SpaceX.

Bankers told prospective investors that existing backers will receive priority in the IPO, while some would-be buyers will get smaller allocations than they expect. Anthropic is staging investor events, including a livestream today featuring CEO Dario Amodei and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon. Shares are expected to begin trading on Nasdaq on Nov. 19.

A sixfold oversubscription signals demand, but allocation mechanics mean retail and smaller institutional buyers may see little stock at the offer price. The first-day pop, not the book itself, will be the real test.

What else is moving markets?

Stock index futures were little changed after the major indexes closed in the red, each down less than 0.5%, in a session traders described as a market without Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Treasury yields eased slightly after a jump in the prior session, with investors awaiting the October Producer Price Index at 8:30 a.m.

For Applied Materials investors, the question now is whether Q1 guidance above consensus marks the start of a sustained AI-equipment upcycle or a peak in incremental demand that Dickerson's quote does not, by itself, answer.