What Does Ebara Corporation Make? Pumps Behind Every Chip Fab

Ebara is a Japanese engineering firm best known for industrial pumps, but it's also the world's second-largest maker of the CMP systems and vacuum pumps chip fabs run on. Here's what it makes and who depends on it.

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Aug 9, 2026 · 2 min read

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Ebara Corporation has spent over a century building pumps, the kind that move water through cities and wastewater through treatment plants. Less visibly, it has also become one of the two biggest suppliers of chemical-mechanical polishing systems used inside semiconductor fabs, alongside the dry vacuum pumps and gas-abatement equipment that keep those fabs running.

The short answer

Ebara sits in two industries at once:

• Chip equipment: dry vacuum pumps, gas-abatement systems, and chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP) tools, where it ranks second globally.
• Customers: over 80% of the top-20 chipmakers run Ebara equipment, including TSMC, Samsung, Intel, and SK hynix.
• Its own suppliers: Nidec supplies the precision motors driving Ebara's pumps, and NSK supplies the bearings that keep them running at high speed.

The full interactive map is on Ebara's supply chain page.

What CMP and vacuum pumps actually do in a fab

Chipmaking builds a wafer layer by layer, and each layer needs to be polished flat before the next one goes on. That's chemical-mechanical polishing, and Ebara is the second-largest supplier of the systems that do it, behind only Applied Materials. Dry vacuum pumps handle a different job: pulling process gases out of the chamber during each fabrication step, a function that has to run continuously and reliably or the whole line stops.