The touted concept is, no one will build without subsidies. Yet without them, Samsung is planning to build! The proof? Well, they spent cash to plan, pay for application prep, and apply.
So yes it seems weird. If anything, it could kill the bill.
That doesn’t suggest that they’d build without the subsidy, but that they want to be able to take advantage of the subsidy right away, if it gets put in place.
Sure, companies love to spend hundreds of thousands on unknowns, for no real reason.
Hmm?
Why not?
Because any company behaving that way, would be bankrupt in a year. 500k is nothing on terms of overall expenditures, but companies drool over cutting production costs by .1 cents, here and there.
Because it adds up! Because spending 500k for Silly Reasons, done over and over, means profit disappears.
500k is nothing to waste. $1 is nothing to waste.
The arguments in this thread are bizarre. They boil down to Samsung spending cash, just in case subsidies appear.
Yet there is no difference in terms of getting a subsidy, if they do the work before, or after it becomes law!
None! No difference! If there was, everyone would be doing it.
So I am expected to believe, Samsung is spending loads of cash, because maybe a bill might be passed, sorta possibly hopefully?!
Where instead, they could wait until the bill is passed, and spend the cash for a guaranteed return.
Competent companies don't spend money this way. Especially, they don't posture that they are ready to build, when there is no subsidy in place, and may never be one!
Is everyone here a Samsung fan or some such? Totally bizarre logic.
You could think of it as purchasing an option, which businesses definitely do.
See Wisconsin and Foxconn.
but then if they might build, subsidies are already not required. Subsidies isn't meant to "push plan over the edge" for something.
To me, subsidies are meant to encourage fabs when it would not actually have been built - that is, it's a transfer of some wealth to the corporation building it, in exchange for some other social benefit (such as self-sufficiency, or redundancy of manufacturing).
In this case, however, samsung has specifically said they don't have plans to build at this time, and only one fab they applied for has a start build date prior to 2029 (and online dates are in the 203x timeframe).