Applied Materials opens EPIC semiconductor research centre in Sunnyvale

Applied Materials has opened its Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization Centre at its Sunnyvale campus in California. The 600,000-square-foot facility contains nearly four acres of advanced cleanrooms. The company expects capital spending to reach $5 billion as new customer projects begin, rather than treating that figure as spending already completed at the opening.

Chipmakers, equipment suppliers, systems companies and university researchers will work alongside Applied's engineers on materials and manufacturing processes. Applied expects the arrangement to give customers earlier access to equipment and shorten the path to high-volume production. Those are intended benefits of the operating model.

Applied unveiled the centre on Oct 12, 2026. Founding partners include TSMC, Intel, SK hynix, Micron and Samsung Electronics. The innovation partners include Broadcom, Advantest, SCREEN, KIOXIA and Besi. Arizona State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stanford, UC Berkeley and UCLA Samueli participate on the research side.

Applied's model brings materials development, equipment engineering and process integration into the same facility, replacing separate development stages and handoffs with parallel work. Prabu Raja, president of its Semiconductor Products Group, attributed the need for closer coordination to increasingly complex materials and interfaces at atomic dimensions. Applied expects additional organisations to join over time; its commercialisation and learning-cycle improvements remain company expectations.

Arizona State, Rensselaer and Stanford were announced as inaugural research partners on May 11, 2026. Their planned programmes cover advanced materials, process and device technologies, and changes in chip architecture. University teams can investigate whether new materials can be integrated with materials already used by manufacturers.

The partnerships also give students practical access to industry-scale equipment and process expertise. Applied and the universities intend the shared research environment to support testing, validation and workforce development. These programmes connect academic work with manufacturing-relevant facilities; the announcement did not provide measured reductions in development time for completed EPIC projects.

Applied and Intel announced expanded collaboration on Oct 6, 2026, linking EPIC with Intel's research campus in Hillsboro, Oregon. The work covers advanced logic technologies for artificial-intelligence computing, including:

• Next-generation materials and transistor architectures.
• Front-end and back-end-of-line process advances, including interconnect scaling.
• Advanced packaging for Foveros-based three-dimensional stacking.

The packaging programme aims to improve interconnect density, power delivery and thermal performance for high-performance computing platforms. Intel and Applied intend their teams to continue this development at EPIC. The programme joins device, wiring and packaging research within the wider collaborative centre.