Applied Materials to invest $400 mn in India for new engineering center

U.S. semiconductor toolmaker Applied Materials will invest $400 million over four years in a new engineering center in India, the company said on Thursday.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met with the company's CEO Gary Dickerson in Washington on Wednesday and invited Applied to strengthen the chip industry in the country.

Applied's investment is among a flurry of announcements this week including General Electric's deal to jointly produce jet engines for the military with state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd and data storage chipmaker Micron's $825 million investment to build a new factory in India.

Modi also met Tesla CEO Elon Musk after which the automaker's top boss said the company will try to be in India "as soon as humanly possible."

The new center is expected to be located near the company's existing facility in Bengaluru and is likely to support more than $2 billion of planned investments and create 500 new advanced engineering jobs, the company said.

Applied currently operates across six sites in India and works closely with Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, two of the country's prestigious institutions.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva, Sriraj Kalluvila and Shailesh Kuber)