Lam Research plans $3B AI lab expansion

Lam Research plans to invest more than $3 billion over five years expanding its global R&D lab network, with expected experiment capacity rising more than 50% from an infrastructure that already supports over one million experiments annually, according to the company’s announcement. Lam says recent customer engagements shortened process development by up to 2.5 times; the operator signal is that AI’s chip bottleneck is pulling capital into faster process learning, not only more fab capacity, alongside the HBM supply chain’s new Indiana buildout.