KLA Corporation’s (KLAC) Critical Role in Zero-Tolerance Defect Environments Soumya Eswaran Mon, October 12, 2026 at 9:48 AM EDT 3 min read KLAC -2.36% ^GSPC -0.06% Trade KLA on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Baillie Gifford & Co, an independent investment management firm, released its third-quarter 2026 investor letter for "US Equity Growth Strategy". The letter can be downloaded here. While AI safety and human control concerns dominated recent industry discussions, the quarterly letter highlights the massive, untapped potential of deploying existing AI capacity into industrial applications. The letter emphasizes identifying sustainable competitive advantages in business model integration over temporary semiconductor scarcity or raw model scale. Against this backdrop, the US Growth portfolio posted positive returns, outperforming the S&P 500 and Russell 1000 Growth indices by approximately four percentage points this quarter. This marks a continued recovery over the past six months, following a difficult end to 2025 and the onset of 2026, supported by fundamental company-level progress. YTD, the portfolio returned -6.7% (net) compared to the S&P 500 Index's 15.7%. Also, check the strategy's top five holdings to see its best picks in 2026.
In its Q3 2026 investor letter, Baillie Gifford US Equity Growth Strategy highlighted KLA Corporation (NASDAQ:KLAC) as a new addition. KLA Corporation (NASDAQ:KLAC) is a global developer and manufacturer of process control, process-enabling, and yield management solutions for the semiconductor and related electronics industries. On October 09, 2026, KLA Corporation (NASDAQ:KLAC) closed at $195.57, with a $255.22 billion market capitalization. KLA Corporation (NASDAQ:KLAC) posted a 60.95% YTD pullback, trading within a 52-week range of $99.86 to $307.37.
Baillie Gifford US Equity Growth Strategy stated the following regarding KLA Corporation (NASDAQ:KLAC) in its Q3 2026 investor letter:
"Rather than chasing these bottlenecks, we want to find the enduring winners of this extraordinary demand. During the quarter, we initiated positions in semiconductor companies Arm and KLA Corporation (NASDAQ:KLAC). Both benefit from the growth of AI infrastructure, but the investment cases do not depend simply on today's shortages persisting.
KLA's inspection and process-control tools become more valuable as semiconductor manufacturing grows more complex and the tolerance for defects falls. The world is going to need many more chips in the coming years, and the underlying technological challenges could further deepen the competitive advantages of Arm and KLA over time.
Distinguishing between temporary scarcity and enduring value is a key question in our research as the AI supply chain evolves. We only want to identify and own companies whose importance increases as the system itself becomes more sophisticated, rather than predicting and exploiting temporary bottlenecks."
KLA Corporation (NASDAQ:KLAC) is not on our list of the 40 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 81 hedge fund portfolios held KLA Corporation (NASDAQ:KLAC) at the end of the second quarter, which was 71 in the previous quarter. While we acknowledge the risk and potential of KLA Corporation (NASDAQ:KLAC) as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than KLA Corporation (NASDAQ:KLAC) and that has 10,000% upside potential, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
In earlier coverage of KLA Corporation (NASDAQ:KLAC), we detailed Jim Cramer's hierarchy for chip-equipment stocks. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q3 2026 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.
This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
