Lam Research breaks ground on AI chip lab in Oregon

The groundbreaking comes amid a wave of U.S. semiconductor expansion. Arizona is hosting two of the country's largest chip manufacturing campuses, TSMC has made a further $100 billion U.S. investment, and Texas A&M has started a $226 million R&D facility. Lam's new lab is part of a planned multibuilding expansion at its Tualatin campus, which will be its largest investment in Oregon. The facility will support advanced deposition and etch process development, as well as materials science and hardware validation. Engineers will collaborate with customers on-site from ideation to deployment, aiming to compress product development cycles. The Washington County strategic investment program, approved recently, includes payments in lieu of property taxes. Lam's global network, spanning the U.S., Asia, and Europe, supports over 1 million experiments annually, and the new lab is expected to increase experiment capacity by more than 50% across the multisite expansion.