Located in Xi’an, China, the factory will require an initial $2.3 billion investment, but is expected to swallow as much as $7 billion as demand for memory chips grows. Samsung's largest flash and DRAM fab which cost the company about $10.6 billion, was opened in September 2011 in South Korea.
According to DRAMeXchange, Samsung accounted for about 34.0 percent of all flash chips devices sold in the fourth quarter of last year. Toshiba was second with 29.7 percent of the market, followed by Hynix with 13.7 percent, Micron with 13.3 percent and Intel with 8.8 percent.
In unrelated news, Samsung said that it has spun off its display unit and officially launched Samsung Display today. Samsung Display employs about 20,000 people, operates five factories globally and has about $20 billion in annual revenue. Samsung Displays was originally founded as R&D unit of Samsung Electronics in 1991.