Apple and GTAT have opened a second sapphire manufacturing facility

Apple’s partnership with GT Advanced Technologies isn’t a secret anymore, with the latter expected to provide sapphire crystal to Apple for various purposes related to the company’s iPhone, iPad and iWatch production. And now it looks like GT will have two plants growing sapphire glass for Apple. Analyst Matt Margolis, who recently revealed Apple may mass-produce more than 200 million sapphire display covers this year, found a new SEC filing from GT that provides more details about the retrofitting of a second GT location. The company has transformed its Salem, Massachusetts R&D facility into a manufacturing factory, which can supply up to 20 million additional sapphire screens each year according to Margolis, on top of the estimated 200 million units mentioned before. The Salem plant measures just 50,000 square feet, and it’s significantly smaller than the 1,300,000 square feet Mesa, Arizona, GT plant.

Apple’s much-ballyhooed sapphire plant in Arizona is not its only production facility for the crystalline material, according to a new regulatory filing from manufacturing partner GT Advanced Technologies, as the two companies have also opened a secondary location in Salem, Mass. GTAT used a portion of Apple’s $578 million prepayment to retrofit its Massachusetts facility — previously a research and development laboratory — with new furnaces to match those in Arizona, according to an amended version of the company’s quarterly report. The amendment was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this week and first noticed by analyst Matt Margolis. The 50,000-square-foot Salem plant is significantly smaller than its Arizona cousin, which measures some 1.3 million square feet. It is unclear if Apple is depending on the Salem facility — which appears to have begun growing sapphire in December — for production, or if the company is simply using it as a testbed. Apple has already been rumored to be exploring an expansion of the Arizona location, which could potentially see it double in size. That could mean the installation of as many as 5,000 furnaces at the site, easily making it the largest manufactured sapphire plant in the world.