Applied Materials (AMAT) commits $5 billion to India and plans a 140-acre chip research park

Applied Materials (AMAT) plans to invest $5 billion in India over the next 10 years. The plan includes a 140-acre semiconductor research park, a tenfold expansion of the company's Indian supply chain, and a doubling of its research staff in the country.

The plan arrives two months after India's government approved a second phase of its chip program, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi put at $13.5 billion, and months after the state of Karnataka approved 140 acres for Applied near Bengaluru's airport. Prabu Raja, president of the company's Semiconductor Products Group, announced the plan in a keynote at SEMICON India in New Delhi on Thursday, September 17. He called it "Applied Materials India Vision 2035," ANI reported.

The $5 billion covers Applied's plans across India over the next decade. In Karnataka, Industries Minister M B Patil put the company's planned investment at Rs 3,600 crore over the same period, about $376 million. A crore is 10 million rupees. The company has not explained how the state figure fits into the national total.

Raja called the proposed site "a new 140-acre advanced semiconductor research park" with cleanrooms and space to work with customers and suppliers, according to ANI. Applied already employs more than 7,000 people in India, according to YourStory, and opened an equipment-validation center in Bengaluru in 2024.

As of September 20, Applied had not posted an investor-relations release detailing the plan. The figures come from Raja's keynote and subsequent reporting.

Patil said in the same statement, issued Saturday and reported by The Hans India, that Applied has chosen Bengaluru for its long-term expansion. "For this purpose, 140 acres is being allotted to the company at Bengaluru Signature Business Park. The project is also expected to create more than 1,000 high-quality jobs," Patil said. A foundation-laying ceremony will be held in the next few months, he said. Patil's statement describes the site as an Applied Materials manufacturing facility and does not use the term research park.

The business park sits near Kempegowda International Airport. Karnataka's cabinet cleared the 140-acre allotment earlier this year at a price of Rs 780 crore ($81 million), or Rs 1,288 per square foot, Swarajya reported. Karnataka Law Minister H K Patil said at the time that the land would be allotted on a lease-cum-sale basis, subject to regulatory clearances and final pricing.

What India is offering

India's cabinet approved the second phase of its chip program, Semicon 2.0, in July with an outlay of Rs 1,27,500 crore, according to the government's release. Modi put the figure at $13.5 billion in the speech that opened SEMICON India on Thursday, according to his office. The program has six pillars. The second covers machines and materials: companies that make or research chipmaking equipment, materials, chemicals, and gases will be eligible for incentives, the release says. The first phase approved 12 projects, and Modi said two new plants, in Mohali and Surat, have started commercial production.

India has committed more than $21 billion across the two programs, Reuters reported. Reuters put the country's chip consumption at $45 billion to $50 billion in 2025 and cited a projection of $110 billion by 2030. Micron (MU) has a chip-packaging plant in commercial production, while Tata Electronics' $10 billion fab in Gujarat has been delayed by nearly two years, according to the same report. "The world is looking for new and trusted manufacturing destinations. India is steadily preparing itself to meet this need," Modi said, in the English summary published by his office.

Lam Research (LRCX) said on Wednesday it plans to invest about Rs 10,000 crore ($1.04 billion) in India over the next several years to build its first silicon-component manufacturing plant in the country and expand its research operations, according to a company release carried by ANI. Karnataka has allotted Lam 73 acres in the Doddaballapura area outside Bengaluru, and M B Patil said that plant is expected to begin operating within a year and a half. Lam has operated in India for more than 25 years.

In June 2023, Applied announced a collaborative engineering center in Bengaluru with a gross investment of $400 million over four years. The company said at the time that the center was expected to support more than $2 billion of planned investments and create at least 500 engineering jobs in its first five years. Applied works with the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru and runs a materials development center at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, according to that release. The company's Japan head told Nikkei this month that Applied is using AI to speed the search for new chip materials, and its EPIC research center in Silicon Valley opens this year. Applied's revenue in the quarter ended July 26 was a record $9.12 billion, and the company guided the current quarter to about $10.25 billion.

What the stock did

Applied shares closed at $417.40 on Thursday, up 0.5%, on the day of the announcement. On Friday they rose 6.5% to $444.57 on 14.3 million shares, more than twice the 30-day average volume of 6.5 million. Other chip equipment and memory stocks also rose on Friday.

For the week, Applied fell 2.6% from its $456.49 close on September 11. Most of that came on Monday, September 14, when the stock dropped 7.1% to $424.21 on a day chip stocks sold off worldwide. The shares remain about 40% below their 52-week high of $739.67, set on June 30. Applied's market value is about $353 billion.

Rupee figures are converted at 95.8 rupees to the dollar, the Yahoo Finance rate on September 17, 2026. Share prices are Nasdaq closes from Robinhood market data as of Friday, September 18, 2026.