South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics is closing in on building a $17 billion chip plant in Williamson County, Texas, according to media reports citing people familiar with the matter.
Earlier this year, Samsung Electronics announced plans to spend $17 billion to build a chip manufacturing plant in the U.S. The new plant will produce advanced logic semiconductor chips and could create about 1,800 jobs, according to documents the company previously filed with government officials. Construction of the 6 million square foot (557,418 square meter) plant is set to begin in January and start production in late 2024.
Although Samsung said it was continuing to conduct due diligence on various sites, no final decision had been made. But a person familiar with the matter said that while no decision has been made, Williamson County, Texas, is most likely to get the project, given the subsidies offered by the local government and the steady supply of electricity and water.
According to media reports the Taylor Williamson county administrative court and the county, the city council has voted by appealing to samsung to tax incentives to build a factory, including samsung use of land will be equivalent to estimate property tax of 92.5% high subsidies, the measure for ten years, compared with 90% for the next 10 years subsidies, fell to 85% after 10 years.
Taylor, Williamson County, is one of two candidates Samsung is considering for a new chip plant in Texas, along with Austin, the state capital. New York and California are also considered locations.
Samsung's proposed new plant will be its second in the U.S. In the first quarter of this year, winter storms shut down Samsung's existing chip plant in Austin, costing it an estimated won300bn-400bn ($254m - $339m) in wafer production. As a result, Samsung electronics is looking to build new production lines outside Austin to address infrastructure-related risks.
Notably, Samsung's plans to build a new chip factory come at a time when the global auto industry is facing a severe semiconductor shortage.
Park Sung-soon, an analyst at Cape Investment Securities in Seoul, South Korea, said Samsung wants to gain a foothold in the U.S. as the U.S. shifts to seeing semiconductors as a strategic material and concentrating semiconductor production only in Asia becomes a risk.
In the global contract chip manufacturing industry, Samsung has the second-largest market share behind TSMC, with 52.9 per cent and 17.3 per cent as of the end of June, according to TrendForce, a research firm.
