Applied Materials Opens $5 Billion AI Chip Lab Aiming to Halve Development Times

Applied Materials has opened EPIC, a $5 billion semiconductor research center on its Sunnyvale, California campus that the company calls the largest U.S. investment ever made in advanced chipmaking-equipment R&D, Fortune reports. The 600,000-square-foot building took two years to construct, and its cleanrooms cover roughly the area of three football fields.

Intel, TSMC, Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics partnered on the project and will station research teams on site, with early access to Applied’s newest tools. The company argues that putting chipmakers and equipment engineers under one roof could shrink the path from concept to commercial chip from 10 to 12 years to as little as six. Chief executive Gary Dickerson called the setup “a complete game changer.”

The center is for research only and will not by itself bring chip manufacturing back to the U.S. Its debut coincided with news of a memory-density advance by China’s CXMT, which pushed shares of Samsung and SK Hynix sharply lower in Seoul.

Read the original story at Fortune.