Applied Materials plans to invest $5 billion in India over the coming decade to bolster the country’s semiconductor industry.
The US-based chip equipment maker will use the investment to establish a 140-acre research park to strengthen its R&D efforts, introduce new technologies, and scale up its India-based supply chain tenfold, Prabu Raja, president of the company’s Semiconductor Products Group, said this week.
According to Raja, Applied Materials has quadrupled its Indian workforce to more than 7,000 employees over the past decade, and has been developing chip equipment design, testing, validation and research capabilities in Bengaluru.
“We can invent together and develop a product together. It’s all about speed today. India doesn’t have to take the same amount of time that other countries took [to develop semiconductor capabilities],” he said, in comments reported by Times of India.
The announcement coincided with the country’s Semicon India event, which took place in New Delhi this week. Established by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the three-day event reportedly hosted more than 600 companies from 52 countries.
The Indian government has been trying to boost its domestic semiconductor sector in recent years, passing a number of pieces of legislation, including the Modified Programme for Semiconductors and Display Fab Ecosystem, an 828 billion rupee ($10bn) scheme that was authorized in December 2021, which allows companies to apply for up to 50 percent of capital costs for eligible semiconductor and display manufacturing projects.
In January 2024, India’s government approved three proposals to build semiconductor manufacturing plants in the country worth a combined 1.26 trillion rupees ($15.2 billion), having previously also green-lit a Micron ATMP (assembly, testing, marking, and packaging) facility.
However, a $10bn chip fab set to be built by Tata Electronics and Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (PSMC) in Gujarat has been delayed by two years.
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