Overview
Anchors Pull Suppliers Into the Region
Samsung's $37 billion-plus Texas buildout drew Tokyo Electron (TEL) to a new downtown headquarters and a Taylor office, and drew Korean and Japanese chemical suppliers to the metro. Apple's $600 billion American Manufacturing Program routes Austin-built Applied Materials tools to Texas Instruments fabs and funds a new chipmaking process at Samsung's Austin fab. Tesla's Giga Texas pulls in casting, battery and GPU supply chains.
Supplier capital scales with anchor commitments rather than leading them. Anchor deals are covered on the Strategic Private Capital page; supplier listings are in the Austin semiconductor directory.
| Supplier | Tier | Austin-area footprint | Capital and incentives |
|---|---|---|---|
| Applied Materials | Equipment | Austin campus since 1992; 5,000+ staff; 500+ suppliers | $400M+ in US manufacturing over five years |
| Tokyo Electron U.S. | Equipment | RiverSouth HQ, Taylor office and R&D site; 238,800 sq ft | $30M+ training and R&D center; $3.08M TSIF (May 2025) |
| Tekscend Photomask | Materials | Round Rock photomask plant | $223M expansion; $15.2M TSIF |
| KoMiCo Technology | Parts cleaning | 201 Michael Angelo Way, Round Rock | $30M expansion; 70 jobs; $750K city incentive; $2M TSIF (March 2025) |
| Flex | Contract manufacturing | Austin plant building SolarEdge inverters | 1,000+ Texas jobs |
| Tesla suppliers | EV components | Giga Texas casting, 4680 cells, drive units, GPUs | Multibillion-dollar aggregate |
| Chemical and gas suppliers | Materials | ENF Technology, Sachem, Linde, Air Liquide, Solvay and others | Hundreds of millions in aggregate |
Equipment Makers
Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron
Applied Materials, the largest US chip equipment maker and second worldwide behind ASML, has run its Austin campus since 1992; it is the company's largest manufacturing and logistics site, with more than 5,000 employees and 500-plus suppliers. Applied posted record fiscal 2025 revenue of $28.37 billion. In August 2025 it joined Apple's American Manufacturing Program, supplying Austin-built tools to Texas Instruments fabs in Lehi, Utah and Sherman, Texas. Applied has put more than $400 million into US equipment manufacturing over five years, plus a separate $200 million Chandler, Arizona site announced in August 2025.
TEL has headquartered its US business in Austin for more than 30 years and employs about 3,400 people nationally, 600 to 700 of them in Austin. On April 16, 2025 it opened a 98,761 square foot headquarters in the Stream Realty tower at 401 South First Street, alongside a Taylor office next to Samsung and an Austin R&D site; its Austin-area space grew from 189,000 to 238,800 square feet. A $3.08 million TSIF grant in May 2025 backs a $30 million-plus training and R&D center designed to train about 2,200 people a year, with partners including UT Austin, Austin Community College and veteran hiring programs. TEL targets about 10,000 global hires over five years. Toshiki Kawai is TEL's president and CEO; Bobby Shirai leads Tokyo Electron U.S. Holdings, and Mark Dougherty leads Tokyo Electron America.
The City of Austin bought TEL's former 107-acre Grove Boulevard campus in Southeast Austin for $87 million in March 2024, using $27 million in Austin Transit Partnership anti-displacement funds from Project Connect. TEL leased back the two buildings until March 2025. The city plans a second Combined Technology and Emergency Communications Center there and is studying affordable housing on the open land.
Materials and Services
Photomasks, Chemicals and Parts Cleaning
Tekscend Photomask received a $15.2 million TSIF grant for a $223 million expansion of its Round Rock photomask plant, a critical input for Samsung Austin Semiconductor and other Texas fabs. Specialty chemical and gas suppliers in the metro include ENF Technology and Sachem (cleaning and etching chemicals), Linde, Air Liquide and Air Products (industrial gases), Mitsui Chemicals and Solvay; photoresist makers such as JSR, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo, Shin-Etsu and DuPont, and wafer makers GlobalWafers, Shin-Etsu Handotai and SUMCO, serve the cluster.
KoMiCo Technology cleans, coats and repairs fab equipment parts, which extends tool life and cuts downtime for Samsung, TEL, Applied Materials and other customers worldwide. Round Rock signed a Chapter 380 agreement with KoMiCo in November 2022 for a $30 million expansion adding 40,000 square feet and 70 jobs, with $750,000 in sales-tax-funded payments; a $2 million TSIF grant followed in March 2025.
Flex, headquartered in Austin, builds SolarEdge solar inverters at its Austin plant, which produced its 250,000th inverter in June 2025 and supports more than 1,000 Texas jobs.
Tesla and Apple
Tesla Suppliers and the Apple-Samsung Process
Giga Texas runs Giga Press die-casting machines from Italy's IDRA Group, among the largest in the world, to cast Model Y and Cybertruck underbodies in single pieces, pulling aluminum, tooling and machine service suppliers into the region. Tesla builds 4680 battery cells in-house at Giga Texas and buys cells from Panasonic, LG Energy Solution and CATL, mostly made elsewhere. The Cortex 2 AI cluster, online since April 2026 with more than 130,000 NVIDIA GPUs, is itself a large hardware purchase. Drive units, vehicle electronics and sensors draw on Austin chip designers including NVIDIA, AMD, Arm, Silicon Labs and Texas Instruments.
Tesla's AI6 chip will be built at Samsung Taylor under a $16.5 billion contract signed in July 2025, and SpaceX's $16.8 billion Terafab in Grimes County will add high-volume chip capacity.
In August 2025 Apple announced that Samsung's Austin fab will launch a chipmaking technology not used anywhere before, supplying power-optimized chips for iPhone. Apple is the customer commitment behind Samsung's investment, which flows on to the equipment and materials suppliers for the new process. Other parts of Apple's US silicon program include TSMC Arizona, Texas Instruments, GlobalWafers America, Amkor packaging in Arizona, Broadcom, GlobalFoundries and an Apple server plant in Houston.
Record
Dataset Record
- Sources
- Office of the Texas Governor TSIF releases; City of Austin and City of Round Rock council records; Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron releases; Apple and SolarEdge announcements
- Last verified
- Q4 2026