Samsung Electronics this week said that it has opened a 300mm NAND flash memory wafer plant in Austin, Texas which will immediately begin putting out 16Gb chips using a 50 nanometer process, rising rapidly to the rate of 60,000 wafers a month by 2008. Samsung is in a war with Intel and its partners and Toshiba, to dominate global Flash memory markets, as well as SanDisk in the US which dominates retail there, and currently Samsung ships more Flash memory than any other company in the world, with it being used in MP3 players, handsets and cameras, and increasingly in PCs, replacing disk drives.
There is a growing feeling that Samsung is moving closer and closer to the US market, whereas a few years ago it was mostly represented by agencies in the US, now it has put down a $3.5 billion marker to get its flash products more credible in the US, and presumably to create its own direct routes to market there. Chip plants in the US use expensive US labor and must be seen primarily as a commitment to the local market and an attempt to carry more local retail and political lobbying weight. It looks to us like Samsung wants to be seen as a good US citizen.
“Our monumental new fabrication facility that we built in Austin is a testament to the company’s commitment to our US customers,” said Vice Chairman Yun. “With the Austin plant, Samsung will supply the American market with the most advanced flash memory products available.
Samsung has committed to an investment of $3.5 billion for the project, making it the largest single foreign investment in Texas and one of the largest in the United States. Previously, the largest foreign investment in Texas was the existing Samsung memory plant, which cost about $1.4 billion in 1996. That plant was completed in 1997 and will continue to be used to manufacture DRAM. Samsung has added 700 employees and now has 1,600 employees in total in Austin.