Samsung committed to invest $356 billion over the next five years, helping create 80,000 jobs primarily in its core businesses including semiconductors and biopharmaceuticals.
While the company is known in the U.S. for its smartphones, its work around chips—especially memory devices—has taken on greater importance during the continuing supply chain crunch. Samsung’s investment is partly designed to “bring forward the mass production of chips based on the 3-nanometer process,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
Samsung is based in South Korea and it is enhanced hiring will be mainly in that country. Still, U.S. OEMs rely on Samsung to produce many of their electronics products.
President Biden visited a Samsung fab in Pyeongtaek on Friday where he spoke about South Korea’s role in the global chip supply chain and praised Samsung specifically. South Korea and the U.S. need to work “to keep our supply chains resilient, reliable and secure,” Biden said. Chips manufactured there are a “wonder of innovation” and crucial to the global economy.
Biden’s visit was notable for diplomatic reasons as well because of ongoing concerns about provocations North Korea has taken, posing threats to the people of South Korea but also the products they make and export to the U.S. and other countries.
Similar tensions have arisen in Taiwan in recent years, with concerns over China’s relationship with Taiwan, a seat of semiconductor production and electronics assembly that U.S. companies including Apple heavily depend upon. “So much of the future of the world is going to be written here, in the Indo-Pacific, in the next several decades,” Biden added on his Samsung plant visit.
The Samsung investment is a 36% increase over its total investment over the past five years. Of the 450 trillion won ($356 billion) investment, 360 trillion won ($285 billion) is being committed to South Korea. The company did not say where the rest of the funding would go.
Samsung employs about 20,000 people within the U.S. Work is underway on a new Samsung semiconductor plant in Texas to open in 2024. It is expected to create 3,000 jobs with a $17 billion investment, Biden said.
Biden said the Texas plant would be like the one he visited in South Korea and would manufacture the “most advanced chips in the world. “I want to thank Samsung for their investment and for continuing to expand the very productive partnership between the republic of Korea and the United States,” Biden said.
He also made it clear that Samsung investment in the Texas plant was a smart business decision. “Samsung didn’t invest $17 billion without, as we say in America, running the numbers,” Biden said. “The United States is a top destination for foreign direct investment like the one Samsung is making because we have world-class, highly skilled and highly committed workers.”
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