Samsung is one of the leading semiconductor chips manufacturers in the world, and enjoys a dominant position in the market of memory chips. In the past few years, we have seen that Samsung has spent a lot on silicon manufacturing plants and technologies, to allow it to produce chips on smaller more efficient processes. Samsung is heavily invested in this sector, as its biggest competitor is TSMC. Samsung sees a huge potential in the market of logic chips like processors. Samsung could use its foundries to produce logic chips for its clients who do not own a foundry themselves.

TSMC is currently the market leader, to beat it, Samsung is ready to go all out on its competitor, by investing around $10 billion. This huge amount of investment will be utilized to develop an advanced chip-making foundry in Texas.

Samsung is trying to develop a foundry with a cutting edge technology, which could allow it to manufacture chipsets on a next-gen 3nm process. Bloomberg has reported that the construction will be started at the site this year, the equipment will be installed the year after, and the operations would kick off in 2023. It was reported that Samsung will use extreme ultraviolet lithography technology to produce next generation chips.

It seems that this is a well thought out decision by Samsung, as the newly elected Biden administration would be trying to get advanced manufacturing jobs back to the US.

The foundry being developed by Samsung in the US could allow it to win clients like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, who are designing their own chips for their data centers, but require a foundry to produce these chips for them.

Well, if you think that TSMC is just standing still and watching its competitor try to poach its clients, it’s not. TSMC is already building a $12 billion chips making plant in Arizona, US.

Samsung’s vice chairman and de-facto heir Lee Jae-yong has already said that, 

“the company will invest $116 billion over the next ten years to revamp its foundry and chip design business”.