Applied Materials and Besi expand AI packaging work at the EPIC Center

Applied Materials and Besi disclosed an expanded strategic partnership on 1 October 2026. Besi joins Applied's EPIC Center in Silicon Valley as an Innovation Partner. The companies trace the relationship to a 2020 joint center in Singapore that produced Kinex, which the release calls the industry's first integrated die-to-wafer hybrid bonding system.

The new scope is packaging for AI scale: new die-to-wafer hybrid bonding platforms, thermo-compression bonding, die-on-wafer, die-on-die and die-on-panel integration, and photonics-enabled interconnects for co-packaged optics. Applied describes EPIC capital spending as expected to scale over time to about 5 billion dollars as customer projects commence, with the center operationally ready this year. That is a capital-spending path, not a payment by Besi and not money already raised.

Why it sits on the AI map: advanced packaging is where high-bandwidth memory and logic dies are stacked for AI accelerators. An equipment maker and an assembly-tool maker putting engineers in the same research center is a disclosed path to work on that flow together.

Besi moves from gray to green. Applied Materials stays green; the Kioxia EPIC disclosure two days earlier already colored it. This is a separate event from that one. No thesis row changes. Nothing turns red.

What would change the picture: a disclosed commercial tool shipment or customer program tied to the EPIC work; a delay of EPIC readiness; or a filing that ties packaging revenue to this collaboration.