KIOXIA reportedly joining Applied Materialsā $5B EPIC Center for AI memory
The Japanese NAND flash giant becomes the latest semiconductor heavyweight to join the largest US investment in chip equipment R&D
Applied Materials’ EPIC Center just added another big name to its roster. KIOXIA, one of the world’s leading NAND flash memory manufacturers, is joining the $5 billion facility designed to accelerate next-generation AI memory technologies from lab concept to factory floor.
The move plugs a notable gap in the EPIC Center’s partner lineup, which already includes Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, Micron, and TSMC. Adding KIOXIA brings dedicated NAND flash expertise to a collaborative hub that had been more heavily weighted toward DRAM and logic chip development.
What the EPIC Center actually does
EPIC stands for Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization. Think of it as a semiconductor sandbox where the companies that make chips and the companies that make the machines to build those chips can experiment together under one roof, rather than shipping prototypes back and forth across oceans for months.
Applied Materials committed $5 billion to the project, making it the largest investment in advanced semiconductor equipment research and development in the US. The facility sits in Silicon Valley and spans over 180,000 square feet of cleanroom space.
The center was initially announced in May 2023 and is expected to be operationally ready by 2026. Its founding partners are arriving on a staggered timeline: Samsung in February 2026, SK hynix and Micron in March 2026, and TSMC in May 2026.
The operational model is designed around integration rather than isolation. Customer engineers from partner firms work directly alongside Applied Materials’ own teams, which compresses the traditional development cycle that can stretch across years of back-and-forth between equipment suppliers and chipmakers.
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Why KIOXIA matters to the AI memory equation
KIOXIA is one of only a handful of companies globally that manufactures high-density NAND flash at scale. The company was formerly the memory division of Toshiba, spun off in 2018 and rebranded in 2019. It has been a persistent innovator in 3D NAND technology, stacking memory cells vertically to increase capacity without expanding the chip’s physical footprint.
Joining the EPIC Center positions KIOXIA to collaborate on storage solutions specifically optimized for AI workloads, where the requirements around data movement speed, power efficiency, and raw capacity are fundamentally different from consumer electronics or traditional enterprise storage.
The broader semiconductor collaboration trend
Applied Materials’ bet is that the answer lies in materials engineering and advanced packaging rather than pure shrinkage. The EPIC Center’s research areas cover advanced logic scaling, next-generation memory architectures including DRAM and HBM, and three-dimensional integration techniques that stack different chip components together.
AI workloads demand higher bandwidth and lower power consumption simultaneously, a combination that requires innovations in how memory chips are patterned, deposited, etched, and packaged. Those are exactly the processes Applied Materials builds equipment for.
The 2026 operational timeline means tangible results are still a year or more away. But the partner lineup now covers virtually every major segment of the memory market: DRAM through Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron, HBM through the same three companies, advanced logic through TSMC, and now high-density NAND flash through KIOXIA.