Samsung Foundry: New $17B Fab in the USA by Late 2023

in my student coop, i once looked up from my studies to see that my clock/thermometer said it was 110F on my desk. so yeah, if you're going to cut down all the shade, can a bro at least get some awnings?

First, cars. Enough said.

Second, they take up a lot of space with low utilization.

Third, heat.

In Europe, for example, you’re much more likely to find covered, multi-level parking structures once a parking lot exceeds a given size.

They didn't get the tax breaks because they didn't meet the targets.

From your article:

After Foxconn failed to meet its job creation targets, Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, last month pulled a deal that would have handed the company nearly $4.5bn in incentives for completing its plans.

Which is not to say this won't become a cesspool, too. But at the very least, I don't see scummy pols waving wads of cash at Samsung right now.

I'm not going to say Foxconn was doing business the way Chinese do business, but maybe there's a culture thing there.

This. Samsung is another company like Amazon that takes long view and flywheel to another level. And to answer question to comment below. Yes at one point Samsung was trying to make their own EUV Scanner, if you consider their NAND and DRAM scale it should comes as no surprise. And Samsung has their own Chemical Subsidiary along with dozen of others for their Foundry. They are taking vertical integration to an extreme.

And that is speaking as someone who dont particularly like Samsung. But Credit where Credit's due.

Not to mention they have to staff the thing, train the staff, etc.

Samsung's Pyeongtaek Line 3 fab broke ground in 09/2020, construction expected to be complete by 2H/2021, mass production by 2023. This is not an unreasonable speed for Samsung.

Of course, the slower rate of work by American construction companies could slow this down.

What US can't source for F-35 locally are Xilinx FPGAs at either 65nm, or 40nm nodes.

The question is not in node size as such as having an FPGA process capability.

FPGAs on generic CMOS don't work great. The ability to tweak, and optimize the process specifically for individual design is huge for FPGAs.

Intel with their CPUs are very much in the same situation, but in reverse. They cannot move from "hand polished" proprietary processes they've been developing for decades to anything else.

Major supppliers include:

Nikon

ASML

KLA-Tencor

Applied Materials (AMAT)

Lam Research

the timeline they are suggesting isn't literally impossible as a matter of phyics but is, to me, laughably unrealistic and likely done to try and extract tax incentives.

Unless they have already broken ground in Texas...and are just shopping for a better deal

But still, if it was a greenfield project, than it would've been nonsense.

I know so many friends and colleagues that have moved to Austin from SF over the years to escape the issues they have with SF (mostly around trying to raise a family, poor schools, high coast of homes with any real space, etc) but it seems like Austin might just slingshot past SF in terms of issues.

.. and has a public ivy college, the Texas legislature, and decades of semiconductors in the area. There's still NIMBY & traffic in the city, but to sum Austin up as simply a cultural hub feels dishonest

I don't know much about semi plants but what sort of jobs are these? Why aren't these plants all automated?

Just seems like the smallest businesses and the largest businesses get the most deals and those in the middle get hosed. Maybe that's working as intended.

It's always about the right response to the right situation. Taxes should be raised in an inflationary environment and lowered in a deflationary environment. The reasoning is quite intuitive. Inflation is a boom, deflation is a bust. It's easier to make money in a boom so the economy can support a greater tax burden. In a bust it's difficult to make money which means the economy can only support a lesser tax burden.

So the questions are "What is currently booming?" "What is currently undergoing a bust?". Well, obviously housing and stocks are booming. Wages are stagnating and thus are undergoing a (relative) bust. Just blindly reducing taxes on one side can be just as harmful as it can be good.

If you are rich enough you can pick what country gets to tax you, if one country raises the tax too much, rich people will just move their taxable assets to another country.

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.“ -disputed John Steinbeck quote

So the figure couldn't really be much larger.

I agree with you. But the parent comment reminds me of when Apple started making computers in Austin and HN was full of people saying, "No, you can't build computers in America because America doesn't have any screws, and can't possibly figure out how to make its own!"

Time and money solve all problems. Even supply chains.

Shipping costs from earth to the moon is $10 000/KG IIRC though, which, if we assume that a processor weighs 10 grams and costs $100 means the value of the stuff you're selling is $10 000/KG, i.e. you can't make a profit on them.

But, suppose you ship 50% of the processor's materials up (with a convenient 100% efficiency of raw materials usage), and you mine the other 50% locally. Which, does the moon have silicon? Yes, it has plenty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_resources#Resources

I suspect lunar silicon would be more expensive to process than terran silicon, primarily due to the lacking skilled labour market in the area. It would likely need to be extensively automated, and likely re-invented from the ground up around the different atmosphere (which while not breathable, is possibly still not clean enough for a cleanroom), gravity, potential power sources (metallurgical coal is a no-go, mainly because there's no easy oxygen but also because coal is quite expensive there).

While it's possible that some raw materials are cheaper on the moon than elsewhere (e.g. platinum from asteroids), I doubt this is the case due to the previously mentioned potential for cheap moon-to-earth shipping.

If there was chip production (CPU, memory, etc.) out of an Austin fab and LCD screen, battery and other material production in a special economic region in Mexico, seems like there could be a full 3-5 day reduction in the production.

Apple sells about 43 million iPhones in the US per year. Shipping 43 million of anything (i.e chips) to Asia only for it to be shipped back (as a finished product) to the US seems counter-productive?

East Texas, particularly south-eastern Texas (near the Gulf) is very humid and can experience torrential rainfall. It's more like Louisiana than El Paso, climate-wise.

Austin is sort of in the transitional zone between the two.

By comparison with California, Austin gets an average of 34.32 inches (872 mm) of rain per year. San Jose gets 15.82 inches (402 mm). San Francisco proper gets 23.65 inches (601 mm).

Austin is considerably more water-rich than the Bay Area.

It's more likely how Austin is still attractive to high-tech personnel - a good public university nearby, a reputation for being a lively city, somewhat reasonable real estate prices (relative to the Bay, but still 2X what they were 10 years ago), and excellent schools if you're in the right area, a decent number of tech options to jump to if you want to switch, a spritely startup scene, enough outdoorsy things to do, etc etc.

Austin isn't in the desert. It gets ice storms, tornados, hurricanes, and the epic Texas thunderstorms that have various names like Blue Norther, Possum Stomper, and Toad Strangler.

I spent five years in Texas, near Austin, and my college meteorology classes came back to me.

Remember when in 2018 SuperMicro servers sold to Apple were compromised by a small chip inserted by a Chinese sub-manufacturer? [1] Or how iPhone designs sometimes get leaked by employees of Foxconn in Taiwan? [2] We've got fabs in the US, but I believe domestic chip manufacture should become central policy to prevent incidents like this.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

[2] https://bgr.com/2019/08/14/iphone-11-release-date-soon-foxco...

>... “leading edge” ...

Does Intel have some leading edge fabs? I read they have some coming in the future, but I think the point is it’s good to have more!

1. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/15/tech/tsmc-arizona-chip-factor...

Nothing against Taiwan or anything. Its just the bloody obvious "first strike" move. China will almost certainly attack Taiwan as part of an offensive-strategy vs the USA.

Having fabs on this side of the Pacific Ocean is important for strategic defense reasons. Of course, the US should move to defend Taiwan in that situation, but if worst-comes-to-worst, we'll need a way to produce chips under such a scenario.

-------

This story is about Samsung however, which is South Korean. North Korea now has nuclear weapons, as well as tons of artillery pointing at South Korea.

For the Samsung-side of things: same thing. South Korea are great allies, but if the North Korean war ever gets started again, Samsung's production inside the US-proper would be a strategic advantage.

I think TSMC was working on a similar deal.

> Won't we also need "rare" earth metal supplies to of it is a vital industry we can't cope with being overseas?

Rare earth materials are available in the US but due to cost competitiveness, all the mining happens overseas. Also the mining process has environmental impacts some countries choose to ignore.

> And then there is the fact the fab machines all come from Belgium.

Which company in Belgium make the fab machines. The biggest manufacturer of semiconductor fabrication equipment are Applied Materials and Lam Research, both in the bay area. ASML from Netherlands make the critical Photolithography equipment however. Beyond this, there are hundred of mid and smaller companies involved all over the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_equipment_sales_...

And "but what about ______, then?" (e.g. rare earths, fab machines) does not mean that all other "______" (e.g. chips) should follow suit. You control what you can.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(chess)

Taiwan is a great ally to the US and having it manufacture chips is good for both economies, but if the US wants to lower risk and keep control of its technological edge it is in its interests to keep manufacturing domestic.

For example, what happens if China decides to take one of the Matsu Islands?

The US is obligated to respond with aggression, and Europe too. Not out of alliance, but out of strategic and economic necessity to keep the second domino from falling.

It's foolish to leave that kind of pressure point exposed to an adversary. Sooner or later, each side will feel it is defending itself against an aggressor and both will engage in what they see as a righteous war.

We can make Taiwan more secure by making it less of a pressure point and freeing our hands strategically. If we are going to react to Chinese aggression with American aggression to protect an ally, it should be decisive not reflexive.

"DOD Awards $30.4 Million for Rare Earth Minerals Facility in Texas"

The Department of Defense and Lynas Rare Earths Ltd. will each contribute $30 million to establish a rare earths processing facility in Texas.

https://thetexan.news/dod-awards-30-4-million-for-rare-earth...

But that doesn't actually have much to do with advanced microprocessor fabs. The "tech" uses for rare earth elements are primarily in making magnets, lasers, and phosphors.