unveiled the on October 12, 2026, a $5 billion facility on its Sunnyvale, California campus. Applied calls it the world's largest site dedicated to collaborative and manufacturing equipment research.
The building is 600,000 square feet, with nearly four acres of space. Construction took more than six million hours.
EPIC is built to remove the handoffs that have shaped chip research for decades. Materials research, equipment and process development, and pilot production have traditionally happened in separate places, with a careful transfer at each stage. Applied has put all three under one roof.
The founding roster is the customer list. Every leading-edge logic and memory maker in the industry is inside the building.
Founding partners are TSMC, Intel, Samsung Electronics, Micron and SK hynix. Innovation partners are Broadcom, , SCREEN, KIOXIA and Besi. Research partners are Arizona State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stanford University, UC Berkeley and UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.
Applied's stated reason for the shared model is that the technologies the AI era demands are too complex and too consequential for any one company to invent alone.
The returns run both ways. Chipmakers get earliest access to next-generation materials and equipment, shorter learning cycles and a faster path to . Applied gets visibility across several generations of emerging technology challenges, which tells it where to point its research spending.
.
The technical stakes were laid out by the partners. TSMC chairman C.C. Wei said the leading-edge was 350 nanometers in 1996 and is 2 nanometers in 2026, a 175-fold shrink in features.
, Intel's CEO, said Intel sees a path to , and that rising R&D costs make closer work with equipment partners necessary.
, Micron's chairman and CEO, said materials and process innovation is a critical enabler of next-generation memory. , Samsung's device solutions CTO, said Applied brings broad process equipment leadership across logic, memory and .
The university partners framed EPIC as a talent pipeline as much as a lab. , president of Arizona State University, said students working alongside Applied's scientists would gain the systems-level perspective the field needs. of Stanford said the center gives researchers access to industry-scale tools.
Applied is selling equipment to companies that compete with each other, and it has put all of them in one building. Keeping five rivals' roadmaps apart inside a shared facility is the problem the operating model has to solve.