Oregon’s Physical AI Corridor - Salem River District

Why Here

What Oregon already has

Oregon already has the pieces. They are spread along the corridor rather than gathered in one place. The Silicon Forest runs the length of the Willamette, from Intel and the semiconductor cluster around Portland through instrumentation, robotics, materials and research talent all the way to Eugene. It holds one of the deepest concentrations of technology companies in the country, and Salem sits in the middle of it. These industries currently work in different cities along the valley.

95,440

core high-tech jobs in Oregon in 2025, down from a peak of 103,200 in 2023

28,338

of those in semiconductor manufacturing, about $4.9B of payroll

$148,274

average high-tech wage, against a statewide private average near $72,000

federal Tech Hubs led by Oregon State: microfluidics, and mass timber

Employment and wage figures: Oregon Employment Department, QualityInfo, 2025. Tech Hubs: US Economic Development Administration, designated October 2023. Oregon State is the only university leading two.

The corridor, north to south

Everything below is confirmed at that location from a primary source. It is a reference rather than a complete inventory, and the omissions are honest ones: we left out anything we could not check.

The corridor, company by company

Hillsboro

Intel Ronler Acres, six wafer fabs and Oregon's largest private employer · Lattice Semiconductor headquarters · Qorvo RF fab and test · Thermo Fisher Scientific semiconductor business unit and electron microscopy · Hitachi High-Tech America nanotechnology center · Kokusai Electric US demonstration center · AGC Electronics America quartzware · Planar Systems headquarters · Epson Portland Inc.

Beaverton

Tektronix global headquarters, test and measurement · Analog Devices largest US site, mature-node manufacturing · Biamp headquarters

Portland

Siltronic silicon wafer manufacturing · Daimler Truck North America headquarters and engineering center on Swan Island, with a new electric and hydrogen fuel-cell facility · Ampere Computing Arm server CPU design · AWS Elemental video engineering · Jama Software · Autodesk · eBay engineering · Puppet · OHSU Knight Cancer Institute, the Vollum Institute and Oregon's only biomedical engineering department · Portland State University Maseeh College, with an intelligent robotics laboratory

Gresham

onsemi 200mm wafer fab across 83 acres · Microchip Technology Fab 4

Tualatin

Lam Research R&D and manufacturing campus, with a $620M cleanroom laboratory breaking ground in 2026 · Kinetics, legally Mega Fluid Systems, chemical and gas delivery for fabs

Wilsonville

Siemens EDA headquarters, design automation · Teledyne FLIR headquarters, thermal imaging · ESS Tech headquarters and manufacturing, iron flow batteries

Salem

Agility, known until March 2026 as Agility Robotics, an Oregon State spinout building humanoid robots at RoboFab · Garmin AT aviation avionics design and manufacturing near McNary Field · Salem Health the mid-valley's largest private employer at about 6,400 staff, running clinical trials · Truitt Bros. thermally processed foods · Willamette University data science and dual-degree engineering · Chemeketa Community College robotics, industrial electronics and machining programs

Albany and Millersburg

ATI Specialty Alloys & Components titanium, zirconium and nickel alloys across 110 acres · Valliscor fluorinated materials for semiconductor etch, new campus from 2025

Corvallis

HP Inc. Corvallis Division, microfluidics and printhead development · Inpria, now part of JSR, EUV photoresist and an Oregon State spinout · Oregon State University · the Corvallis Microfluidics Tech Hub

Eugene

STRATACACHE the 1.2M sq ft former SK Hynix plant, converting to micro-LED production · University of Oregon

Where Salem sits. About 47 miles by road from Portland, 35 from Corvallis and Oregon State, 60 from the Hillsboro fabs and 64 from Eugene. It is the point on the corridor within an hour of all of them, and it is also the state capital.

What we left out. Widely repeated totals for Oregon high-tech businesses and semiconductor supply-chain companies are absent because we could not trace them to a dated primary source. Locations were confirmed against company sites, city economic-development pages and NIST CHIPS award pages. FAST, the Frontiers of Advanced Semiconductor Technology engine, is an NSF Regional Innovation Engine led by Oregon State with up to $160M over ten years and close to a hundred partner organizations across twelve counties.

The work that is already here

Physical AI is a narrow technology that touches wide industries, and it is worth being clear which way round that is. Semiconductor manufacturing employs about 28,000 Oregonians. Health care employs three hundred thousand. Construction employs a hundred and eighteen thousand. Agriculture and food manufacturing together employ around eighty thousand. The technology on this page is small. The work it would touch is not, and most of it is not high-tech work.

Sector in Oregon	Jobs	Average wage	Where it meets this
Health care and social assistance	301,000	varies widely	The fastest-growing sector in the state, projected to add 40,400 jobs by 2034. Care robotics, lab automation and rehabilitation.
Construction	118,200	not published	Near a record high statewide, though down 3.8% in Salem this year. Off-site fabrication and assembly.
Transportation and warehousing	71,600	not published	Autonomy, materials handling, and the corridor itself.
Agriculture, forestry and fishing	52,924	$49,046	Field robotics and plant-level sensing. Farmworkers are about 39% of it, at $37,294.
Food manufacturing	28,207	$57,459	Marion County holds 13% of the state total, second only to Multnomah. Processing automation and inspection.
Semiconductors and electronics	28,338	$173,152	The high-wage core of the stack, and the smallest number in this table.
Wood products manufacturing	22,400	$68,275 to $79,413	Engineered wood and sawmills. The material input to industrialized building, already made here.
Forestry and logging	8,787	$65,530	The front of the same supply chain, mostly rural.

An indoor hydroponics commons inside a reused bow-truss warehouse — Controlled-environment growing in a reused bay

An ag-tech test yard between reused warehouses with raised beds, sensors and a small autonomous cultivator — Field trials a few minutes from the bench

Oregon Employment Department, 2024 and 2025 figures. Oregon manufacturing overall is 178,900 jobs at an average wage of $90,100, though excluding semiconductors that average falls to roughly $73,000, which is about the statewide average of $71,964. Wage columns are left blank where no primary figure was available.

Salem's own picture, which is the reason to do anything at all. The metro has 191,200 nonfarm jobs. Government is 47,100 of them, about a quarter, because this is the state capital. Manufacturing is 11,500 and fell 4.2% over the past year. Construction is 12,600 and fell 3.8%. The average weekly wage here is $1,280 against $1,569 nationally. A district that adds work across several of the sectors above, at several wage levels, matters more here than a district that adds only the highest-paid kind.

Humanoid manufacturing in Salem

Agility, an Oregon State spinout known until March 2026 as Agility Robotics, manufactures humanoid robots at RoboFab in Salem, reported as the first purpose-built factory of its kind.

Two federal Tech Hubs

Oregon State leads two federally designated Tech Hubs, in semiconductors and in mass timber, among the few universities in the country to hold two. The research engine for an applied district sits 35 miles south.

Mass timber and clean construction

Oregon's mass-timber sector, the OSU and University of Oregon TallWood Design Institute, and the Port of Portland's timber manufacturing campus show a region turning industrial waterfronts into clean-construction innovation. The district joins that map.