The upcoming, first-of-a-kind, Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will unlock a new era for studying the properties of nuclear matter via deep inelastic scattering. This will provide new discovery opportunities for probing unanswered fundamental questions surrounding the strong force binding visible matter together. The collider, which will be built at Brookhaven National Laboratory (USA), will be an extremely powerful and versatile accelerator facility, with unique capabilities. It is currently also the only new large-scale accelerator facility planned to be built in the near future. The EIC will collide spin-polarised electrons with polarised protons and light ions, as well as a range of unpolarised heavy ions. With its variable centre-of-mass energy (20 - 140 GeV) and its high luminosity capabilities (up to 10^34 cm−2 sec−1), the EIC will allow for the exploration of new landscapes in QCD, and an exciting and vast program of hadron structure topics is planned. This includes nucleon and nuclei “tomography”, i.e. high-resolution mapping of the quark and gluon components inside nucleons and nuclei, to access new information on their 3D and inclusive structure in the gluon-sea region, with unprecedented precision, as well as the possibility to probe gluon saturation. Such measurements will be realised by a fully hermetic and cutting-edge general-purpose detector, developed by the ePIC Collaboration, which is supplemented by far forward and far backwards beamline instrumentation. This will allow measurement of all final state particles in the collisions, including fully exclusive reconstruction of diffractive processes and photoproduction. In this talk, an overview of the EIC and its physics goals will be covered, as well as some selected highlights from exclusive, diffractive and tagging physics program of the EIC.
