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Ichor makes the plumbing and machinery that chip factories use to feed gases and fluids into their manufacturing processes.
Ichor makes the unglamorous hardware that chip factories can't run without. To turn a silicon wafer into working chips, plants have to move incredibly precise amounts of gases and liquids in and out of their machines, over and over, in clean rooms where even a stray particle ruins the product. Ichor builds the gas and fluid delivery systems — the metal boxes, pipes, valves, and sensors that handle that job — plus the precision-machined parts that go inside them. It sells these systems to the big equipment makers, which bolt them onto the machines that buy from them.
The business is simple at heart: Ichor is a contract manufacturer for the semiconductor equipment industry. Its customers are the companies that make chipmaking tools, and Ichor builds the subsystems and parts those tools need, often to the customer's exact design. The customers matter a lot — a few large equipment makers make up most of its sales, so when chip factories are building, Ichor's order book swells, and when they pause, it shrinks fast. That dependence cuts both ways. The company's revenue rises and falls with the chip industry's spending cycle, which is notoriously boom-and-bust. It has grown by acquiring other component makers and by riding the long boom in chip manufacturing capacity, and it has also had stretches of losses when the cycle turned. Its edge is its relationships with the equipment giants and its ability to make precise parts at scale; its weakness is that it has little pricing power and no control over when its customers decide to build new plants.
In 1999, Ichor started with one narrow job: delivering fluids for the machines that make computer chips. Chip factories need gases and chemicals to flow with extreme precision, and Ichor built the plumbing-like subsystems that do it. What began as a regional specialist grew into a global supplier, mostly by winning more work and buying other companies.
By 2016, Ichor was getting ready to sell shares to the public, and it tidied its factory footprint first. It bought a business called Ajax and shut down its Kingston, New York site, taking a write-down on the value of that location. The message was simple: fewer plants, more focus, and a cleaner story for investors.
That December, Ichor completed its initial public offering and began trading on NASDAQ. The company that started as a fluid delivery specialist now had public money to grow with. It had become a global supplier to the big makers of chip equipment.
In May 2025, Ichor reported first-quarter results that fell short of what analysts expected, on both revenue and profit. Gross margin came in at 12.4%, well below the 14.5% forecast, because the company had to buy more parts from outside suppliers. The stock dropped 23.2% in a day, and law firms opened securities fraud investigations.
A few months later, in August 2025, CEO Jeff Andreson agreed to step aside, and the board began looking for a successor. The chairman credited him with integrating five acquisitions and recapitalizing the company. Andreson stayed on as an executive advisor through August 2026 to make the handover smooth.
Then came the reveal: in the third quarter of 2026, Ichor's non-GAAP earnings per share of 63 cents beat the consensus of 45 cents by 40%. Gross margin reached 16%, up 190 basis points from the prior quarter and ahead of guidance. The company was pushing more of its own proprietary content and adding manufacturing capacity toward a $3 billion revenue footprint.
The market had already taken shareholders on a wild ride: shares ran from a 52-week low near $14 to above $113, then fell by more than half from that high. Revenue was growing on AI-driven demand for chip equipment, but gross margin stayed near 10%, because manufacturing constraints forced Ichor to rely on lower-margin work at customer sites. Investors sold off on doubt that margin would ever catch up to revenue.
Headquartered in Fremont, California, Ichor sits in the heart of the equipment industry and has manufacturing in the United States, Singapore, Malaysia, and other locations, which helps it serve customers building plants around the world. It isn't a household name, but every advanced chip made today likely passed through equipment that touched one of its parts.
Saved answer · last researched 4 Nov 2026