Well, hello. This is Nitin Dahad with E Times and I'm here at the Applied Materials Epic unveiling today, and with the CEO, Gary Dickerson. Gary, hello. How are you?
Oh, glad to have you here.
Well, we've spoken to you many times. I think this is the first time face to face.
So, great to be here and great to be here on this sunny day with your building in the background.
Just tell us a little bit about what's happening today.
Yeah. So AI is the most important race in the global economy. AI compute runs on semiconductors and Applied Materials innovation enables better and faster AI semiconductor technology. So here we will bring companies through the technology stack, all the leading companies, from system companies, design companies, chip companies, material companies, universities, to accelerate innovation, and it really is accelerating tokens per second per watt from concept to commercialization. So just really, really, really exciting. And again, it's focused on innovating the way we innovate. I was just in an R&D summit earlier today. We had all of the leading companies consuming chips and designing and manufacturing chips. And I think there's an enormous focus from everyone to accelerate the performance and power. And Epic is going to bring all of these innovators together, collocating all of them together to accelerate innovation.
Now, one misconception when I read the announcement, maybe that some of the audience will have as well, is it's one big happy family. It's not. What you're providing is a lab for companies to come and work with you on their own confidential commercial IP. Just explain that because I'm not sure it was very clear in the announcements.
Yeah. So again, Applied is by far the leader in materials innovation, which is increasingly important for AI computing performance. So we work with all of these companies that are competing with each other, but they're all in a race. They're all in a race to have better AI compute performance and power. Also a race to be able to ramp the number of good chips per wafer in the yield to close the demand supply gap that exists in the industry today. And so again, for us, there's a focus on innovation velocity but also trusted innovation. We've built these capabilities over many years within Applied Materials and you can see all of these top leaders coming here. They have high trust that we will work with them to accelerate their innovation, but we're also absolutely focused on trusted innovation and protecting IP.
Now operationally, how will that work? So for example, if I'm company AX, I'm not going to mention names because they've got a couple of different names and I don't want you to be in a position you don't want to answer. So company X, say, they will have a budget to do some research and they'll come and work, like, say, do a contract with you. How does it work operationally? I don't understand.
Yeah. So this is really an extension of what we've been doing forever. The companies that are winning in the industry today are the ones that have been driving this concept of co-innovation for a number of years, but we're just taking this to another level to accelerate co-innovation and co-creation of these architectures. So we work with all of these companies 10 years out in the future, four technology nodes out in the future, creating faster and better transistors. We're the leader there, creating the wiring. And by the way, in some of these advanced packages, you have thousands of miles of wiring, if you can believe it.
And you're moving the data at extremely high speeds with almost no resistance and low power. High-speed memory, we're innovating with all of those companies. The multi-chip connectivity and advanced packaging technologies, we're innovating there all the way to the system level with a number of these different companies. So we firewall the teams that are connecting with each one of these different companies. And again, at the foundation of Applied Materials strategy is trusted innovation. So we've proven this with these companies. We've been co-creating the architectures with them for a number of different years. And I really believe again, the companies that innovate faster and better with both velocity and trust, co-creating from a system standpoint, is going to be absolutely essential to winning the AI race.
Yes, I mean, it's all about the AI race right now. But let's just go back a little bit. Was it three years ago or something where you had the idea you didn't have anybody signed up? What was the... okay, I think I've understood from what you've just answered, it's about helping customers innovate, but what was the seed of the idea in your mind that says, okay, we need to do this? I mean, it's quite a large investment. You know, at that time it was three billion and I think it's moved up to five billion.
Yes, well, it was always five billion, by the way. But you know, in the semiconductor industry, I've been in the industry for a very long time as an engineer and as an innovator. I think what we do is create miracles. I mean, if you think about an application processor in your smartphone with 20 billion transistors, 60 miles of wiring, and that chip is around $30. How do you... I mean, this is like... it's amazing. Yeah.
So, you know, for Applied, we had our first AI design forum nine years ago. So we could see that this new compute workload was going to create a tremendous opportunity.
