Applied Materials Inc. (NASDAQ: AMAT) announced a new innovation partnership with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to accelerate development of semiconductor technologies for artificial intelligence applications. The companies will collaborate at Applied's EPIC Center in Silicon Valley to advance materials engineering, equipment innovation and process integration technologies.

The partnership builds on more than 30 years of collaboration between the two companies. Gary Dickerson, President and CEO of Applied Materials, said the collaboration will strengthen their partnership and accelerate development of technologies to address complexity in the chipmaking roadmap.

Dr. Y.J. Mii, Executive Vice President and Co-Chief Operating Officer at TSMC, stated that meeting AI challenges at a global scale requires industry-wide collaboration and that Applied's EPIC Center provides an environment to accelerate equipment and process readiness for next-generation technologies.

The collaboration will focus on three main areas: process technologies that enable power, performance and area improvements across leading-edge logic nodes for AI and high-performance computing; new materials and manufacturing equipment for forming complex 3D transistor and interconnect structures; and advanced process integration approaches to improve yield, variability control and reliability for vertically stacked and scaled architectures.

Applied's EPIC Center represents a $5 billion investment in advanced semiconductor equipment research and development in Silicon Valley. The center is designed to reduce the time required to commercialize breakthrough technologies from research to manufacturing. Capital spending is expected to scale over time to approximately $5 billion as customer projects commence.

The EPIC Center will provide chipmakers with earlier access to Applied's research portfolio, faster learning cycles and accelerated transfer of next-generation technologies into high-volume manufacturing within a secure collaborative environment.