Applied Materials, the Santa Clara chip equipment maker, announced a deal this morning to supply $1.9 billion worth of machinery for making thin-film solar panels.

The tools will be used in factories that will manufacture enough solar panels to produce 1 gigawatt of electricity a year. Last year, the world's solar industry produced enough panels to make 12 gigawatts of electricity.

"It is the largest sales agreement in Applied history and quite possibly in the history of the solar industry," said Patricia Zepeda-Vera, a company spokeswoman.

Applied Materials won't name its customer for this transaction, she said, but it needed to file something with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission due to the size of the contract.

The company was only identified in SEC filings as "a privately held corporation based outside the United States."

Applied said in its most recent earnings report for its first fiscal quarter that it took $260 million worth of orders in its division that sells solar-panel-production equipment, up from $31 million in its first fiscal quarter of 2007.

Most of those orders came from companies outside the United States, it said - 24 percent from Taiwan, 19 percent from Korea, 13 percent from Japan, 12 percent from Europe and 10 percent from China and Southeast Asia. North American companies placed 22 percent of the orders.