Does KLA support Israel?

According to a June 2025 JLens analysis of corporate support for Israel after October 7 (based on JLens's direct engagement with companies), KLA provided support for the New Israel Fund's work with LGBTQ+ families, organized annual community events in Israel such as Tu BiShvat celebrations, and donates to the education department of Israel's National Museum of Science, Technology and Space, which exposes young students to science and technology; KLA employees also planted therapeutic gardens benefiting at-risk youth. Amounts were not disclosed. Company and employee activity as reported by JLens; no independent corroboration located.

TheMarker reported that, following the war, KLA had begun acting to move about a quarter of its manufacturing in Israel to Germany, under a plan that includes diversifying production sites; German production could begin as early as the start of 2025 and grow gradually. KLA, which had been making chip-industry inspection machines in Israel for 40 years and holds the plant at Migdal HaEmek, told the paper: "we have no intention of reducing the number of employees in Israel." Recorded here because it runs the other way from the company's earlier expansion in Israel. The body of the article is behind TheMarker's paywall, so this row rests on its headline, standfirst and opening paragraph, which carry all of the above; reporter Omri Zerachovitz.

KLA has operated in Israel since the 1980s, when it established a wafer-inspection and metrology R&D/production facility in Migdal HaEmek (about 530 employees at the time of the Orbotech deal in 2018); the 2019 Orbotech acquisition added the Yavne campus, making Israel one of KLA's largest bases outside the US. As of March 2024 KLA employed about 1,500 people in Israel and had been promoting a new plant at Zippori in the Galilee. In 2024 it closed Orbotech's legacy flat-panel-display division in Yavne, laying off over 100 employees, citing market decline — its other Israeli operations continue.

Emek News reported on 28 July 2022 that KLA had given, since the start of the year, scholarships for outstanding students and support for groundbreaking academic research totalling about $250,000 — the only money figure anywhere in the article's body. The paper's headline puts the same sum at about ILS 800,000, implying 3.2 shekels to the dollar; that shekel figure appears in the headline, title tag and image caption only, and in no paragraph of the piece. The article separately says that over the past academic year the company awarded scholarships to more than 50 students at all degree levels at the Technion, Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University, Bar-Ilan, Ben-Gurion, ORT Braude College, Azrieli College of Engineering and the Lev Academic Center, from the engineering, physics and software-engineering faculties, for academic achievement and research excellence; that sentence carries no figure. About 14 of the scholarships went, under a special diversity and inclusion project, to outstanding Technion students from Arab society. Vicky Plotnik, KLA's diversity and inclusion manager for Israel and Europe and its academic relations manager, said the company had devoted resources and special attention to academia-industry ties for many years.

KLA employees from Arab society began volunteering monthly with a group of about 20 pupils at a middle school and a high school in Shefa-Amr and Mashhad, under the Israeli Education Ministry's national "STEM in the Periphery" excellence programme, running hands-on sessions in the company's own fields such as electro-optics — including building an optical microscope out of a sheet of paper and a lens. Separately KLA itself gives financial support, with no figure reported, to the robotics team of the school in Iksal; Wasim Nimri, a senior electronics engineer at the company, mentors the team, which came second nationally and was due to travel to a competition in the United States in May 2022. This is employee volunteering plus company funding of one school team, attributed here as such and not as a corporate donation programme.

KLA Israel tied a workplace step-counting challenge to Breast Cancer Awareness Month: 216 employees walked 15,971,338 steps over two weeks using the Rumble app, and KLA converted the steps into a donation of ILS 20,000 — about $6,110 at the Bank of Israel representative rate of 3.273 shekels to the dollar on 7 December 2020 — to "Achat MiTesha" (One in Nine), which supports women with breast cancer. The money was the company's; the employees contributed steps, not funds. Mor Azaria, a senior director at KLA and chair of its WISE women's-empowerment forum, described the competition. Reported by Emek News on 7 December 2020.

Through its WISE (Women in STEM Empowered) forum, KLA's Migdal HaEmek operation donated "tens of thousands of shekels" to the Israeli Association for Economic Empowerment for Women. No figure was reported, so the amount column stays empty. The association trains women setting up their own businesses under a programme called "A Business of Your Own" and gives them personal mentoring and interest-free loans; Emek News reported that it carries between 10 and 15 loans a year and recycles repayments into new ones, and that KLA's donation would translate into six loans to businesses needing to recover from the COVID-19 crisis.

KLA's Migdal HaEmek operation donated 150 food parcels during Ramadan to needy families in Yafa an-Naseriyye, Iksal and other villages near its offices. Vicky Plotnik, then HR manager of KLA Israel, said the company gives regularly to the community it lives among and had donated hundreds of meals to needy residents of Migdal HaEmek over the preceding two months, and that its giving to Arab society in Israel had until then been concentrated on scholarships for outstanding students. Ramadan in 2020 ran from late April to 23 May; Emek News reported the donation on 5 June 2020. No monetary value was given, so the amount column stays empty.

With the COVID-19 emergency under way, KLA's management decided to add a further donation to the community around its Migdal HaEmek plant: ILS 110,000, about $30,520 at the Bank of Israel representative rate of 3.604 shekels to the dollar on 7 April 2020. The money went to the municipality for two purposes — distributing 100 hot meals to families in quarantine, hard-pressed families and housebound people living alone, and buying laptops for children from families that could not afford one while the city's schools were teaching remotely. Mayor Eli Barda thanked company president Ori Tadmor and its management in Israel and abroad. Emek News also describes KLA's standing local giving: employee volunteering and support at the "Yonatan" club for children and youth at risk, work in the city's junior high and high school, and scholarships for science students.

Completed the acquisition of Israeli electronics-manufacturing-equipment maker Orbotech at an equity value of approximately $3.4 billion (announced March 19, 2018) — one of the largest acquisitions of an Israeli tech company at the time. Per KLA's SEC filing, aggregate purchase consideration was approximately $3.26 billion ($1.90 billion cash plus $1.32 billion in KLA shares and assumed equity awards). Orbotech employed roughly 2,500 people at its Yavne headquarters and continued operating there as a KLA business unit.

KLA-Tencor began building a second plant at its Migdal HaEmek site in the Galilee — an additional clean room for a new production line. Ori Tadmor, president of KLA-Tencor Israel, told Techtime the line was for core semiconductor-industry machines that had until then been made outside Israel, and that Israeli teams had been embedded in KLA-Tencor's global production system for that product line. The development centre and plant already on the site employed about 530 people and built all of the company's metrology machines in Israel, making KLA-Tencor Israel one of the group's four global manufacturing centres; the company had also bought adjoining land for a further building. Tadmor: "this is a great expression of confidence in local human capital." This is capital investment in Israeli manufacturing, not a donation, and the report puts no figure on it.

KLA-Tencor Israel donated 37 scholarships worth ILS 80,000 in total — about $20,670 at the Bank of Israel representative rate of 3.871 shekels to the dollar on 20 May 2016 — to students of electrical and electronics engineering, computer science and physics at Tel Aviv University. They were handed over at a ceremony attended by Dr Ami Appelbaum, president of KLA-Tencor Israel, the company's HR manager Rachel Eshet, and the university's dean of engineering Prof. Yossi Rosenwaks, who thanked the company for connecting academia to industry. The company then employed about 450 people at Migdal HaEmek.