Technology giants are increasingly designing their own semiconductors to optimise everything from artificial intelligence tasks to server performance and mobile battery life. Google has the Tensor Processing Unit, Apple has the A13 Bionic and Amazon.com has the Graviton2. What the titans all lack, however, is a factory to build the new chips they are dreaming up.
Enter Samsung Electronics, which is planning a decade-long, $116-billion push for their business. The South Korean company is investing heavily in the next step in miniaturising semiconductors, a process called extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). It’s by far the priciest manufacturing upgrade Samsung has ever attempted, a risky bid to move beyond its established business of cranking out commoditised silicon and to leapfrog the incumbent leaders in the $250 billion foundry and logicchip industry.
Enter Samsung Electronics, which is planning a decade-long, $116-billion push for their business. The South Korean company is investing heavily in the next step in miniaturising semiconductors, a process called extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). It’s by far the priciest manufacturing upgrade Samsung has ever attempted, a risky bid to move beyond its established business of cranking out commoditised silicon and to leapfrog the incumbent leaders in the $250 billion foundry and logicchip industry.
“A new market is opening up,” Yoon Jong Shik, executive vice president of Samsung’s foundry business, said recently. “Companies like Amazon, Google and Alibaba, which lack experience in silicon design, are seeking to make chips with their own concept ideas in order to boost their services. I think this would bring a significant breakthrough for our nonmemory chip business.”
Samsung plans to spend about $10 billion per year on equipment, research and development over the next decade, but TSMC is even more ambitious with capital expenditure of around $14 billion for this year and next.
