LONDON – South Korean Electronics giant Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has said it will spend $7 billion on a NAND flash wafer fab in Xian, a city in the northwest of China, according to reports the reference regulatory filings as their source.
Samsung announced it was looking to build NAND flash memory fab from which it could service Chinese makers of smartphones and tablet computers in
December 2011. It was reported at the time that the plant would likely begin production with a 20-nm class manufacturing process and was intended to be in commercial production before the end of 2013.
Samsung is reported to have said Monday (April 2) that it will spend $2.3 billion on the first stage of construction of the plant with a total of $7 billion to be spent over the next few years. Although Samsung has wafer fabs in Austin, Texas, the Xian wafer fab would represent the company's largest overseas investment in chip production, a
Bloomberg report said.
The Xian location was selected because "the production and R&D bases of global IT corporations are concentrated around Xian and the site is well-equipped with industrial infrastructure,"
The Chosunilbo quoted a Samsung spokesperson as saying.
Korea and China are destined to become Samsung's primary locations for NAND flash memory production.
Samsung said in
September 2011 that it had commenced production at Line-16, a wafer fab capable of producing DRAM and NAND flash memories, at the company's Nano City Complex in South Korea's Gyeonggi province and on which it said it had invested 12 trillion Korean won (about $10.2 billion). Construction of that fab began in May 2010 with equipment installation completed one year later. Trial production began in June 2011 with commercial production following in September.
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