Samsung To Invest $3.9 Billion Into Texas Chip Plant

South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics has been given the green light by the local government to expand its mobile chip production in Austin, Texas.

The company will invest $3.9 billion (£2.4bn) into upgrading the existing manufacturing lines and adding new ones, at the plant which already makes A5 and A5X processors for Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

Deep in the heart of Texas

Samsung Electronics is already the world’s largest memory chip supplier by revenue, and it seems that it wants to dominate the logic chip market the same way.

According to MarketWatch, the deal is the largest ever single foreign investment in the state of Texas, and will bring Samsung’s total investment into the Austin facility, which opened in 1996, to over $13 billion.

Earlier this year, the company announced it would spend 2.25 trillion won (£1.3bn) on a new logic chip plant in South Korea. Samsung has also combined two memory chip lines at an existing plant into another logic chip foundry, to meet the growing demand for mobile processors.

Samsung is also building a $7 billion (£4.4bn) semiconductor factory in China, to specialise in NAND chips.

This summer Intel, Samsung’s competitor in the chip market, announced its own $5 billion (£3bn) investment into a chip plant in Arizona.

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