According to The Wall Street Journal, Samsung is scheduled to launch a new sophisticated chip-making factory in Texas later today, which is projected to cost roughly $17 billion and generate 1,800 jobs. According to reports, the new plant would be built near Taylor, some 30 miles from Austin, where Samsung already has a facility. According to the WSJ, the new location is around 1,200 acres in size, making it larger than Samsung’s Austin facility.
Governor Greg Abbott is scheduled to deliver a “economic statement” at 5 p.m. local time Thursday, and the news might come as soon as today. According to earlier filings, the factory isn’t slated to start generating chips until the end of 2024. Samsung is scheduled to start producing CPUs at the new factory in the near future, both for its own use and for use in other firms’ products.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the city of Taylor has given Samsung incentives to build its facility there, including property tax cuts of almost 90% for the first ten years.
Samsung is a memory chip manufacturing behemoth, but the Taylor factory will most certainly be used to produce sophisticated chips for other firms based on their ideas. According to previous rumors, this new factory might make chips as sophisticated as 3nm. Samsung has previously manufactured semiconductors for Qualcomm and Nvidia.
The business declined to comment on the story to the WSJ, saying simply that “a final decision about the site has not yet been made.”
The expansion comes as the worldwide chip scarcity continues to wreak havoc on everyone from video game developers to automobile makers. According to recent statements from Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, the situation is unlikely to improve until at least 2023.
As a result, the Biden administration is working to boost US chip output, decreasing the risk of supply chain disruption and reversing the country’s recent decline in manufacturing share. According to Bloomberg, the Senate just authorized $52 billion in subsidies for new chipmaking operations, albeit the CHIPS Act has yet to clear the House of Representatives.
The chip industry is planning capacity expansions, but many of the new factories will not be operational for some time. The manufacturing of TSMC and Sony’s planned $7 billion chip facility in Japan will not begin until 2024, the same year as TSMC’s massive $12 billion Arizona plant. Over the next three years, TSMC aims to invest over $100 billion in new semiconductor plants, while Intel wants to invest a comparable amount in the US and Europe over the next decade.