By Stephen Nellis
(Reuters) – Samsung Electronics Co Ltd is considering Austin, Texas, as the site for a new $17 billion chip plant that the South Korean firm said could create 1,800 jobs, according to documents filed with Texas state officials.
The documents say the project would involve building out 7 million square feet (650,000 square meters) of new space on a 640-acre (259-hectare) site that the company already owns. The company has an existing chip plant in Austin that makes computing chips.
Samsung’s filing said it plans to make “advanced logic devices” for outside customers at the facility, meaning it would aim to make the smallest, fastest kinds of computing chips.
While Intel Corp makes such chips for itself in the United States, most contract manufacturers who make them for outside clients, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) Co Ltd and Samsung, maintain most of their facilities in Taiwan and Korea, respectively.
Those facilities make chips for American customers such as Apple Inc and Qualcomm Inc. TSMC last year disclosed plans for a $12 billion chip plant in Arizona expected to come online in 2024.
Samsung said in its filings that if Austin is selected, the company would break ground on the site in the second quarter of this year and that the plant will become operational in the third quarter of 2023.
The filings with Texas officials were made public Thursday and earlier reported https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/02/04/samsung-austin-expansion-chip-plant-seeks-1-billion-taxpayer-incentives/4309503001 by the Austin American-Statesman newspaper.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis and Hyujnoo Jin in San Francisco; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
