August 14, 2026 / SemiMedia / — Lam Research plans to invest more than $3 billion over the next five years to expand its global semiconductor research and development laboratory network.

The multi-site investment will add infrastructure and technical capabilities across the United States, Asia and Europe. Lam expects the expansion to increase its total experiment capacity by more than 50%, with work scheduled to begin in 2026.

Lam currently operates specialized laboratories for materials research, process development, product engineering and customer technology validation. The facilities work as an integrated global network, allowing equipment, experimental data and technical knowledge to be shared across regions and time zones.

The company’s existing R&D infrastructure supports more than one million experiments each year. Laboratories focused on new chemistries, materials and mechatronics can reduce some experimental programs from several weeks to a few days.

Process development laboratories move new technologies toward production readiness, with engineering, product development and manufacturing teams working on the same equipment. Technology centers located near customer facilities support process qualification and validation with customers’ engineering teams.

Lam said this approach has accelerated process development by up to 2.5 times in some recent customer projects. The additional laboratory capacity is intended to shorten development cycles from early technology research through deployment in semiconductor fabs.

AI chips increasingly use new device structures, materials and advanced packaging technologies that require more deposition, etch and other nanoscale processing steps. Equipment suppliers must complete more experiments and work with chipmakers earlier in the development cycle before these processes can enter volume production.

Lam Research CEO Tim Archer said the faster pace of chip development is creating demand for new architectures, materials and complex structures requiring nanoscale precision.