Samsung won a preliminary award of $6.4 billion in direct funding under the CHIPS and Science Act for a leading-edge facility in Taylor, Texas, and expansion of its Austin fab.
The company’s proposals will undergo more thorough review before a final award is made. Samsung will also seek a 25% investment tax credit for its projects, expected to cost $40 billion.
Samsung joins Intel and TSMC in winning multi-billion preliminary awards under the CHIPS Act, administered by the US Commerce Department and NIST. The act was signed into law by President Biden in 2022, and has also granted preliminary awards to GlobalFoundries, Microchip Technology and BAE Systems. The entire fund has $39 billion for such work.
The Semiconductor Industry Association celebrated the award to Samsung as a means of helping bring more semiconductor production, innovation and jobs to US shores.
Samsung’s plan for Taylor, Texas, calls for two leading-edge logic foundry fabs for mass production of 4nm and 2nm process technologies and an R&D fab for work on future nodes. An advanced packaging facility with AI applications for 3D High Bandwidth Memory and 2.5D packaging is also planned. Such work would serve communications, automotive and defense industries.
In Austin, Samsung plans to expand a 30-year-old facility to produce fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) process technologies for aerospace, defense and automotive. Samsung has commitments to collaborate with the US Department of Defense in this area.
Federal officials said the CHIPS investment in Samsung would bring 17,000 construction jobs and 4,500 manufacturing jobs to central Texas over the next five years.
“We’re not just expanding production facilities; we’re strengthening the local semiconductor ecosystem and position the US as a global semiconductor manufacturing destination,” said Kye Hyun Kyung, CEO of device solutions division at Samsung Electronics, in a statement.
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