Applied Materials Will Invest $5 Billion In India Through 2035

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Applied Materials will invest $5 billion in India over the next decade under a programme it calls India Vision 2035, announced ahead of SEMICON India 2026.

The centrepiece is a 140-acre advanced semiconductor research park near Bengaluru airport. It is to house cleanrooms, equipment engineering and collaborative research facilities, including capability for research using 300-millimetre silicon wafers, allowing the company to develop and test chip manufacturing technologies alongside customers, suppliers and universities on a single site.

The company also intends to scale its India-based supply-chain capacity tenfold by 2035, bringing more of its global suppliers into the country. It plans to more than double its Indian research and development workforce, and to work with universities to narrow the gap between academic training and industrial requirements.

Applied Materials employs more than 7,000 people in India, a figure that has grown fourfold over the past decade. Beyond Bengaluru, where it has built capabilities in semiconductor equipment design, testing, validation and research, it plans to add operations in Chennai and Mumbai and has proposed a customer-support centre in Gujarat.

Prabu Raja, President of the company's Semiconductor Products Group, announced the programme at SEMICON India 2026 and pointed to the company's existing footprint, noting it was among the first to establish a semiconductor engineering capability centre in the country and ordered India's first 300-millimetre lab in 2024.

Applied Materials supplies the equipment, services and software that chipmakers use to manufacture semiconductors rather than producing chips itself. The announcement describes an expansion of its role from equipment design towards developing complete products for global customers.

SEMICON India 2026 has drawn around 600 companies from 52 countries, including ASML, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron and Micron.

The distinction worth holding onto is that Applied Materials does not make chips.

It makes the machines that make chips, and the software and services that keep them running. That places this investment in a different part of the industry from the fabrication projects that usually attract attention, and arguably a more durable one. Fabs are enormous, capital-intensive and specific to a process generation. Equipment vendors sell to every fab, regardless of who owns it or what it produces, and their customer relationships outlast individual facilities.

It also explains the shape of what is being built. A 140-acre site with cleanrooms and 300-millimetre research capability is not a factory. It is a place to develop and test process technology with customers and suppliers present, which is how semiconductor equipment is actually designed. The tools are co-developed with the people who will run them, because a machine that works in isolation and fails in a customer's process is worthless.

The company's framing is that it is moving from equipment design in India towards developing complete products for global customers. That is the substantive claim in the announcement. Designing part of a tool is engineering services work. Owning a product end to end, from architecture through validation, is a different capability, and it is the one that determines whether India becomes a place where semiconductor equipment is invented rather than merely assisted.

The tenfold supply-chain target is the commitment with the widest reach, and the one least within Applied Materials' control.

Scaling local sourcing by that factor means Indian firms supplying components into machines that must operate to tolerances measured in nanometres, inside cleanrooms, for customers who cannot accept a defective part at any price. Qualifying a supplier to that standard is slow work, and it is the reason semiconductor equipment supply chains are concentrated in a handful of countries.

If it succeeds, the beneficiaries are precision engineering firms that mostly do not think of themselves as semiconductor companies. Vacuum systems, gas handling, motion control, specialist metals and machined components are the actual content of these tools. That is a broader industrial base than chip design, and one India already has in adjacent sectors.

The timeline deserves the same attention as the number. Ten years is long enough for the current wave of semiconductor enthusiasm to pass, for governments to change and for incentive regimes to lapse. A commitment stated through 2035 is a direction of travel rather than a contract, and the parts of it that are measurable in the near term are the research park and the R&D headcount rather than the supply-chain multiple.

The 300-millimetre capability is the detail that makes the research park more than real estate. Most Indian semiconductor research infrastructure has operated at smaller wafer sizes, which limits how directly findings transfer to commercial production. Research conducted on the same wafer size as global fabs produces results a customer can actually use, and that is what distinguishes a working development facility from a demonstration one.

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