South Korea mulls creating 'KSMC' contract chipmaker to compete with TSMC, requires a $13.9 billion investment

TSMC fab
(Image credit: TSMC)

Although Samsung Foundry is a major chip contract manufacturer, the South Korean government mulls creating a government-funded contract chipmaker tentatively called Korea Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, KSMC, reports The Korea Biz Wire. Industry experts and academics have proposed the initiative.

The Semiconductor Industry Association's Ahn Ki-hyun called for a long-term government investment. Experts project that an investment of KRW 20 trillion ($13.9 billion) in KSMC could result in economic gains of KRW 300 trillion ($208.7 billion) by 2045. However, the big question is whether $13.9 billion is enough to establish a chipmaker. Another concern about publicly funded corporations like KSMC is whether they could develop advanced manufacturing technologies and land enough orders from clients to be profitable. It turns out that in addition to semiconductor makers, Korea needs more fabless software developers.

Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

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.

  • COLGeek
    Competition and multiple sources can only be beneficial to customers/users. Good luck.
    Reply
  • usertests
    There's one path to jumping ahead of TSMC. I hope someone takes it.

    Kentucky Fried Semiconductor Company next.
    Reply
  • phead128
    This is more for legacy nodes though.
    Reply
  • awake283
    Obvious statement but it's probably good for all of us if there's more than one group of people on Earth that know how to fabricate these chips.
    Reply