That's over 10 years, or just over $10B in CAPEX and R&D per year. That sounds a lot, but the company routinely spends $20B-$30B in CAPEX every year. In comparison, Samsung's annual marketing budget (advertising, sales promotion and incentive) easily exceeds that amount.
That being said, Samsung really wants to go beyond memory chips and is serious about the foundry business.
State of the art chip fabs require some of the most advanced technology we've developed, the purest materials we can produce, and the most stringent environments we can maintain.
Exactly. Fabs have air quality restrictions that make surgical rooms look like trash dumpsters, relatively, as far as cleanliness goes.
EUV patterning, of which TSMC bit the bullet on early, adds another huge cost to an already crazy expensive manufacturing process.