(June 26): Advantest Corp stands to benefit as a boom in artificial intelligence (AI) development makes chips more complex in coming years, boosting demand for the semiconductor testing equipment it supplies, the company’s chief said.

Chief executive officer Douglas Lefever, waving off concerns that investors may be overestimating future demand, told Bloomberg Television that AI wasn’t just spurring data centre investment but will also fundamentally boost other industries including cars. Advantest stock finished more than 7% higher on Wednesday, posting its biggest gain since February after Lefever’s company outlined higher-than-projected targets for operating profit.

Advantest, the world’s biggest supplier of chip testing equipment, said it aimed to increase its share of the chip testing equipment market to at least 58% over the next three years on average. That’s compared with the previous three years’ average of 54%. Chipmakers will need more rigorous testing to reduce bad production batches as the architecture gets more sophisticated, Lefever said.

“They have to do a thorough testing of those devices in order to make sure they don’t throw them away at the very end,” he said. “There’s a lot of new test content — we say test times, test insertions — and there’s also more emphasis at the beginning when they are individual dies before they come together.”

China will remain an important market for the company and the industry despite US efforts to curb the country’s semiconductor industry, he added. Advantest remains focused on serving that market, the CEO said. It accounted for 37% of Advantest’s sales in the March quarter.

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