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Samsung this week announced that it would build a new fab near Taylor, Texas. The new facility will produce chips for various applications and help the company better serve its clients in the U.S. when it comes online in 2024. The total cost of the fab is estimated at around $17 billion.
Samsung says that the new fab site near Taylor, Texas, will span more than 16 million square feet of space. Still, the company hasn't disclosed actual production capacity, possibly because it will build the fab in several phases, and its final capacity will differ from the initial capacity. Samsung plans to create 2,000 high-tech jobs directly, and thousands of related jobs after the fab goes online. The company's current fab in Texas employs 3,000 people directly and another 7,000 indirectly.
The new fab will be located 16 miles away from Samsung Foundry's current semiconductor production facility in Austin, Texas. The proximity of the two fabs will allow them to share infrastructure and resources, including materials.
Samsung, one of the world's largest contract semiconductor makers, said it will start building the new fab in the first half of 2022 and expects the facility to become operational in the second half of 2024, suggesting a rather quick build-up and equipment move in. Samsung will spend $6 billion on buildings and property improvements, whereas tools will cost another $11 billion.
Samsung didn't disclose which process technologies it will use at its new fab in Texas, but it claims that the fab will be used to make chips for mobile, 5G, high-performance computing (HPC), and artificial intelligence (AI) applications, clearly suggesting the fab will be more advanced than the facility near Austin, which is used to produce chips using down to Samsung's 14nm-class nodes (which includes 14LPP and 11LPP process technologies). The company also stressed that the site would be a key location of the company's global fab network.
Samsung has searched for the right location for the plant for about a year. The company reviewed several states, including Arizona, New York, and Texas, but decided to stick to Taylor in Williamson County as the state, city, and county offered incentive packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars, reports Austin American-Statesman.
"As we add a new facility in Taylor, Samsung is laying the groundwork for another important chapter in our future," said Kinam Kim, Vice Chairman and CEO, Samsung Electronics Device Solutions Division. "With greater manufacturing capacity, we will be able to better serve the needs of our customers and contribute to the stability of the global semiconductor supply chain. […] In addition to our partners in Texas, we are grateful to the Biden Administration for creating an environment that supports companies like Samsung as we work to expand leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. We also thank the administration and Congress for their bipartisan support to swiftly enact federal incentives for domestic chip production and innovation."
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
