CEO Richard Blickman seeks to allay fears of a slowdown in his firm’s primary growth market. Besi’s hybrid-bonding orders in the first nine months of 2026 exceeded twice the total booked in all of 2025. The equipment maker now counts 23 hybrid-bonding customers, with cumulative demand exceeding 215 systems. The growth reflects more logic chiplet programs entering production. It’s also propped up by faster-than-expected expansion in co-packaged optics and the start of edge AI device production. Hybrid bonding is currently primarily applied in logic manufacturing. Momentum for hybrid-bonding equipment got hit as memory makers pushed back the introduction of hybrid bonding in high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Nonetheless, interest from memory makers is increasing, says Besi CEO Richard Blickman in a press statement. The Kinex integrated die-to-wafer bonding system is jointly developed by Applied Materials and Besi. Credit: Applied Materials “We anticipate that hybrid bonding will be adopted in a range of stack heights over the next two years and in new, innovative stacks combining HBM, custom advanced-logic base dies and the direct bonding of DRAM onto accelerator chips by the end of the decade,” comments Blickman. He notes that “a leading memory customer” ordered hybrid-bonding systems for the development of structures. Blickman also rejects suggestions that ASML is becoming a hybrid-bonding competitor. “To the best of our knowledge, ASML is interested in a roadmap for 3D transistor stacking inside the chip over the next decade and not in competing with Besi in the area of die-to-wafer hybrid bonding. In fact, ASML and Besi are jointly working together on die stress programs to improve placement accuracy, and consequently throughput, as well as other mutually beneficial areas of collaboration.” While ASML has declared an interest in die-to-wafer bonding and hybrid bonding, it hasn’t announced concrete plans. The litho giant doesn’t intend to compete with existing solutions, however. “We won’t go into an existing market with a product that’s roughly similar to what’s already there. We target applications that produce at least 30-40 percent more value than our competition,” CTO Marco Pieters told Bits&Chips . Besi’s total third-quarter revenue rose 113.6 percent year-on-year to 283.4 million euros, while net income increased 323.7 percent to 107.2 million euros. Orders reached 342.6 million euros, up 17 percent from the previous quarter and 96.1 percent from a year earlier. Fourth-quarter revenue is expected to remain within 5 percent of the third-quarter level as some customers schedule deliveries for capacity expansions in the first half of 2027.