U.S. semiconductor toolmaker Applied Materials will invest $400 million over four years in a new engineering center in India, the company said on Thursday.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met with the company's CEO Gary Dickerson in Washington on Wednesday and invited Applied to strengthen the chip industry in the country.
Applied's investment is among a flurry of announcements this week including General Electric's deal to jointly produce jet engines for the military with state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd and data storage chipmaker Micron's $825 million investment to build a new factory in India.
Modi also met Tesla CEO Elon Musk after which the automaker's top boss said the company will try to be in India "as soon as humanly possible."
The new center is expected to be located near the company's existing facility in Bengaluru and is likely to support more than $2 billion of planned investments and create 500 new advanced engineering jobs, the company said.
Applied currently operates across six sites in India and works closely with Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, two of the country's prestigious institutions.
Micron
U.S. memory chip firm Micron Technology, Inc said on Thursday it would invest up to $825 million in a new chip assembly and test facility in Gujarat, India, its first factory in the country.
Micron said that with support from the Indian central government and from the state of Gujarat, the total investment in the facility will be $2.75 billion. Of that total, 50% will come from the Indian central government and 20% from the state of Gujarat.
Reuters reported earlier this week that India's Cabinet approved the project ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's state visit to the U.S., which kicked off on Wednesday.
Micron said construction of the new facility in Gujarat is expected to begin in 2023 and the first phase of the project will be operational in late 2024. A second phase of the project is expected to start toward the second half of the decade, it said. The two phases together will create up to 5,000 new direct Micron jobs.