Who makes CMP and chemicals for AI data centers

Chemical-mechanical planarization grinds and polishes the wafer flat between build steps. It has to be flat: lithography can only hold focus across a very shallow depth, so every deposited layer has to be levelled before the next one can be patterned. The consumables are the slurry that does the cutting, the pads it runs on, and the cleaning chemistries that remove what the polish leaves behind. This catalog groups those with the wider process chemicals — etchants, strippers, developers and high-purity solvents — because they share a supply structure. All of them are qualified per process step at each fab, shipped at purity grades that are the product, and consumed continuously rather than per chip. A fab does not switch chemical suppliers quickly, and the qualification is what makes the position durable. AI reaches this part the same way it reaches the rest of the fab materials group: through wafer starts and layer counts at advanced nodes, and through HBM, where stacking and thinning add planarization steps that a planar die does not need. What to look for is purity grade and process qualification rather than tonnage, and where a supplier sits geographically — several of the key chemistries have a concentrated production base, and export controls and single-site production have both disrupted this group before.