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Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas
- radium3d 5y agoNice, so they can be powered by Tesla's megapack / solar and ship chips directly to Tesla Terafactory via Boring tunnel! Cybertruck manufacturing is looking green
- peter_retief 5y agoTexas is the new choice for multinationals, they seem to be doing something right or is it that some states are a mess?
- shmatt 5y agothe only mix of well educated locals without relocating people, and wide areas of empty land
- summerlight 5y agoI think it's the latter. Over the last decade, CA (especially northern) has demonstrated a spectacular failure on meeting housing demands. TX is the second largest economy so it's a quite natural to become the new candidate, especially in the context that NY has been suffering from a similar housing issue.
- sangnoir 5y ago>> Samsung spent years evaluating where to build the new fab, courting multiple locations and pitting them against each other for better incentives Perhaps other states are not willing to top the gobs of money Texas offered to Samsung. The Amazon HQ2, race-to-the-bottom strategy is alive and well
- bnt 5y agoSo everyone is on the "Let's build a Fab in the USA" train, will that eventually bring down the chip production costs? (not an expert in the field, so asking naively)
- lkbm 5y ago(Also not an expert.) In general I wouldn't expect US manufacturing to do a lot to lower production costs. More capacity in general obviously helps, and I could definitely see the US doing a lot to subsidize domestic production, if that counts as bringing down the costs. Maybe higher wages will lead to more automation.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fabfabfab 5y agoExpert here. Worked in a Fab (Automated Material Handling Systems or AMHS group). You might be suprised how automated it already is [1]. Notice the OHTs (Overhead Hoist Transport)[2] running on a system of highways and superhighways on the ceiling. Each of these OHTs carry a box inside it called a FOUPs (Front Opening Unified Pods)[3] carrying upto 25 wafers. That can easily be worth $1M+ per box. They have standardized JEDEC interfaces so any process tool can accept a FOUP and get wafers out of it. The environment inside these FOUPs is ridiculously clean and each one costs $15k for what most people would think is a plastic box with a door in the front. FOUPs are used internally. If wafers are shipped, they're shipped in a similar box called FOSB or Front Opening Shipping Boxes [4]. These boxes are the reason automation happens with standardized "APIs". We don't need to know who made the process tool to hand them a box of wafers. Another automation feature are the AGVs or Automated Guided Vehicles [5] that carry the same FOUPs and FOSBs [5]. They also can be equipped with a robot arm that takes a wafer out of the box and hands it over to the tool. The AGVs run on specialized roads inside the Fab and remains docked on the tool during processing. Usually, there are hardly any humans around the tool. Material (wafer) is fed by AMHS systems, picked up by the same. Fab is probably one of the most automated manufacturing places out there. Way more than Automotive manfacturing. If you're looking to do software engineering, I would highly encourage people to go work in semiconductor industry. It is just a fucking cool place and lot of room for improvement still. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRlcZqqyBM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRlcZqqyBM8 [2] https://www.muratec.net/cfa/products/ https://www.muratec.net/cfa/products/ [3] https://www.entegris.com/shop/en/USD/Products/Wafer-Handling/Wafer-Processing/300-mm-Front-Opening-Unified-Pods-%28FOUPs%29/c/300mmfrontopeningunifiedpodsfoups https://www.entegris.com/shop/en/USD/Products/Wafer-Handling... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOUP#/media/File:Front_opening_shipping_box_(front_side).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOUP#/media/File:Front_opening... [5] https://www.muratec-usa.com/machinery/clean-room/transport/AGV/ https://www.muratec-usa.com/machinery/clean-room/transport/A...
- lkbm 5y agoPreviously posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29314269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29314269 (paywalled article)
- newaccount2021 5y agowithin ten years, the I35 corridor will be the most intensive economic region in North America
- markus_zhang 5y agoThat's a reasonable point.
- JavaBatman 5y agoI am still amazed by the shortsightedness of how these critical and strategic goods are off-shore. No wonder why the supply chains are fragile and not robust. It should be illegal for strategic goods and components such as chips and semiconductors to be produced offshore. Yes, it will raise prices in the short and medium-term, but it will make the domestic economy and manufacturing sector more robust, resilient to supply shocks, and antifragile. We need a true industrial policy and state capitalist system similar to what Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have.
- kwillets 5y agoSamsung is considered the epitome of state capitalism, so there may be some confusion about that last sentence.
- csours 5y agoHow does making something illegal counteract economic forces? Hint: Look at Soviet Bloc economics. They imported high tech goods even after spending loads of money on trying to build them internally. I would agree that onshoring more of the supply chain makes a lot of sense, but I think it must be an economically viable solution. I don't know exactly how to do that, but things like having a guaranteed market (like we do for food) might be part of the solution.
- yaacov 5y agoYou might enjoy reading about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export-oriented_industrialization https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export-oriented_industrializ...
- ecf 5y agoThe blame for this is purely on the shoulders of business leaders coming out of MBA programs across the US. It seems the only thing those places are teaching is how to join a company, strip it to the bone, hype up the short-term 5% growth, and get millions of dollars in raises.
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- burnished 5y agoOk, this article quietly gets fucking wild halfway through. >> Samsung spent years evaluating where to build the new fab, courting multiple locations and pitting them against each other for better incentives. But the ultimate decision came down to Samsung Group's leader Jay Y. Lee, who was granted early parole in August expressly to speed up crucial business decisions like the Texas chip fab. Accounting for between 10 and 20 percent of the nation's GDP, Samsung is often given preferential treatment, with executives pardoned for crimes in the name of ensuring national economic growth. In 2017, Lee was convicted of bribing a friend of then-President Park Geun-hye, and sentenced to five years in prison in Korea. His sentence was revised down to 30 months, of which he has served around 18 months. The Samsung leader bribed Choi Soon-sil, a pseudo-Christian cult leader nicknamed "the Korean Rasputin," who may have helped decide government policy during the Park administration. Park denied she held shamanistic rituals at the presidential compound, but was removed from office following the scandal. She has since been sentenced to more than 30 years in prison. Lee gave Choi money and horses in an effort to ensure a merger within different subsidiaries of Samsung would pass, helping him solidify control over the company after his ailing father passed. His father, Lee Kun-hee (who was also convicted of bribing a president, and subsequently pardoned), suffered a heart attack in 2014, and was left incapacitated as a result. But he was left technically in charge until his death last year. With Lee now the group leader, he must sign off on all large merger and investment decisions, including US chip expansion plans.
- miohtama 5y agoThis is why I watch Korean dramas on Netflix. Juicey.
- bradhe 5y agoMan that just kept getting better and better.
- elzbardico 5y agoWhen I was a kid I was bullied by the kids calling me crazy, because of my overly imaginative approach to reality. Fast forward a lot of years later i look at reality and find out that the bullies had no clue at all. The real world is far more bizarre than any of the imaginary worlds I created in my mind during childhood
- guai888 5y ago‘Impossible':TSMC founder Morris Chang on US dreams for onshoring chip supply chain https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4327937 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4327937 Morris Chang spent 25 years (1958–1983) at Texas Instruments.He knows US very well.
- jvanderbot 5y agoWell that sounds about right from the guy who moved it all to Taiwan. I hope the scene has changed a little in the last 40 years. The US is eager to have these businesses, and I can imagine a lot of incentives and regulatory reductions.
- kragen 5y agoIt has changed. That's what makes it impossible.
- justapassenger 5y agoYou have to take his words with a grain of salt. Without going into politics, it’s impossible to talk about TSMC without geopolitical context. It’s essential to TSMC survival for their production to physically stay focused in Asia.
- nathanm412 5y agoIt's essential to Taiwan's survival for production to physically stay focused in Taiwan. I don't know if the US would be as willing to defend Taiwan if our own recovery wasn't affected by the chip shortage.
- ineedasername 5y agoYep. to use a quote I've heard about another resource: "No one would care as much about stability in the Middle East if they produced toothpaste instead of Oil". Unfortunately at the same time for Taiwan, once the West's reliance on that area of the world for production becomes less of an issue, China's timeline gets accelerated much faster to the "No but really you're part of the PRC" point. Similar to how the PRC ratcheted up control over Hong Kong in 2020 when the rest of the world was basically "Sorry HK we got COVID issues k'bye"
- otrahuevada 5y agoit makes perfect sense to have a factory right on your most critical client, even leaving the typically american grandiose fantasies of apocalyptic destruction aside. It even nets them a cool 3 billion dollars to do so, which I'm fairly sure is very welcome given Samsung's history of reinvesting this kinds of money for political gain. I do wonder why this isn't more common though, pretty much every gigantic company already has an administrative arm in the US, it sounds like it'd make sense to move at least some of their production side there too.
- bell-cot 5y agoWhen it is an incredibly expensive factory, requiring an incredible level of technical expertise to operate, and air freight from anywhere on earth to your biggest client is scarcely a rounding error in the price of the finished products - then NO, it makes no sense to put the factory next to the client.
- otrahuevada 5y agoOn one hand, I misspoke. The US is not their biggest market, just a strategically _very_ important foothold in the continent, making and breaking financial decisions that impact every other country. On the other, do you happen to have sources for all that? Specifically, - That the cost of this plant is going to be in any way excessive/odd compared to, say, TSMC's plant basically next door - That the level of technical expertise required is inordinately hard to train in the US - That the air freight from (also, why air freight specifically?) prices to and from there are a constant, easily disregardable thing and will continue to be so Would help a lot to ground the conversation in reality a little bit more.
- eigen 5y agoAre they doing package and test at this fab or do they need to ship parts out to somewhere else, likely another country, before the client can use them?
- otrahuevada 5y ago
- jason-phillips 5y agoI worked at Samsung Austin Semiconductor for ten years as a software engineer. AMA. I very much love the people I worked with at SAS. It was one of the best experiences of my life and I'm very happy to see them expand like this. Wayne at Louie Mueller's BBQ had better add a few more pits, they're about to get a lot busier!
- gjsman-1000 5y agoHow do you get into chipmaking, really? Is it a Physics degree, or is it a Computer Science degree with just lots of on-the-job training?
- dreplogle 5y agoAt least on the hardware side of things, it's an Electrical or Computer Engineering degree, usually with at least a Masters
- jason-phillips 5y agoIt depends on what you want to do. If you want to work on one of the processes in the fab (metrology, chemical vapor deposition, photolithography, etc) then an engineering degree (especially chemical engineering) may be your best bet. If you want to design the chip architecture, then computer engineering is the degree path you want. Samsung has their own chip design subsidiary in Austin too, over on Highway 360 in west Austin, if I remember correctly, called SARC. Austin Community College has associate degree programs designed for technicians. I was a software engineer responsible for many of the internally-facing enterprise systems, as well as the intranet. I worked with all of these engineering departments on many different projects, so I had exposure to and visibility into many functional areas and processes of a truly global, high-tech manufacturing concern. In one of the random ways the universe has rolled the dice in my favor, one day a recruiter called me and asked, "Would you like to work for Samsung?"
- throw10920 5y agoI know a few people who went to university near a large Intel campus that was always hiring. These people told me that if you got hired into Intel, it was almost always as a design verification & validation engineer, and that getting an actual design (architecture) job was near impossible (especially as a recent graduate, even with an MS). Is it the same for Samsung?
- diveanon 5y agoSeems strange to build a chip plant in a place that can’t even provide power to its citizens in winter.
- AaronNewcomer 5y agoIt made news because of how rare it is. Happens often elsewhere. California about burnt down because of their power grid. Snowy states get bad blizzards and often lose power, etc.
- theduder99 5y agoI guess they know something you don't huh.
- diveanon 5y agoNo, seems like we are all pretty aware of the kickbacks and bribery.
- josaka 5y agoAfter the TX grid failure last winter, it's probably not a coincidence that Samsung's new facility will be near ERCOT's operation center in Taylor, which manages the TX grid, and will likely be the last load to shed when the grid's stressed. Used to work in the Austin fab, and the amount of money lost per minute in a power failure is mind boggling. The tax breaks Taylor offered ($314m) are not that different from what Samsung was reported to have lost due to the grid failure ($270m).
- 0_____0 5y agotangentially related bit of trivium... when i was house hunting a looked at a house across from a fire station, and upon doing research about what it's like to live across from one, found that a.) they tend not to blast sirens upon exiting the station, in contrast to living near a hospital with an ED, and b.) the power grid segments that fire stations are on have priority and are less likely to lose power during blackouts.
- shortstuffsushi 5y agoI wonder if the siren thing varies from location to location, a good friend of mine lived right next to one and it seemed you couldn't go 15 minutes without being drown out by them heading out.
- mindcrime 5y agoI wonder if the siren thing varies from location to location, In my experience (former firefighter here), it absolutely does. It also varies by call type, time of day, etc. So if we got a call at 2:00 AM and there was no traffic on the road near the station, we might leave the station with no siren out of respect for the people trying to sleep in the homes very close to the station. This would be more true if the call was a lower priority call in the first place. OTOH though, if the call as "residential structure fire with occupants reported trapped" our focus would not be on sleeping neighbors and there's a better chance that we'd be getting on the Q pretty much right out the door. Another factor for us was that our station was right next to an intersection that was very busy at times, and known for many traffic accidents. So any call where we had to turn left (towards the intersection) out of the parking lot, there was a better chance we'd be hitting the siren and air-horn pretty much right from the jump. Anyway, yeah, net-net, this is going to vary based on lots of factors: department policy / culture, geography, time, traffic, etc, yadda yadda.
- rllearneratwork 5y agowith Tesla, SpaceX, Samsung and other tech investing this heavy in Texas, when/will it surpass CA as a tech powerhouse of the future?
- optimalsolver 5y agoWhen their power grid isn't held together with blu tack.
- dntrkv 5y agohttps://www.statista.com/statistics/424167/venture-capital-investments-usa-by-state https://www.statista.com/statistics/424167/venture-capital-i... As far as VC money goes, Texas has a ways to go.
- jeffbee 5y agoI don't know but if you were waiting for a signal, Samsung built another, larger, and more valuable fab in Austin a decade ago. And if you are judging by fab capacity the question you should have asked is when Texas will overtake Arizona. There really are very few semi fabs in California.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- adam_arthur 5y agoBeyond specific companies, Texas has more favorable business climate and tax rates. Housing alone is such a huge knock against CA for new companies. Even paying somebody 500k there leaves them feeling middle class when trying to raise a family. Perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but in Texas they build like crazy to support population inflows. If you drive through Austin you'll see every third or fourth house is getting torn down to be rebuilt into 2-3 houses on the same plot. Fundamentally this just gives you a lot more runway to grow. I don't know why anybody would start a company in SF these days, aside from VC being local and sometimes requiring it. I have no doubt Texas will overtake CA in terms of economic output, but will take decades just due to previous inertia. Also remote work may be the true winner in the end. I do think CA is still the place you want to be if money is no object though. Unfortunately that doesn't apply for most people. There may actually be a change in political winds that blow things back the other way though, just viewing this from today's lens.
- cronix 5y agoThis is a great first step. The more fabs that are built here, the more supply chains that feed them will follow. Supply chains tend to follow the manufacturers where feasible. This will eventually improve things even more for the other high tech companies in the state as they do move supply chains closer to production. Texas has been making some pretty substantial long term investments in the last few years. If you don't plant trees today, you won't have shade to sit beneath 20 years from now. The best time to start is often yesterday. These things take time and a great deal of capital and I'm glad to see some places are moving forward.
- goatherders 5y agoGood to see the clown-car that is Texas state government embrace foreign investment from a company run by criminals when it suites them. I'm a Texan and my house if full of Samsung products, but the Gov and Lt Gov are, as always, hypocrites.
- tills13 5y agoTexas is nothing if not hypocritical and reactionary.
- russellbeattie 5y agoWhy in the world would Samsung choose Texas? Does that seem like a state with a functioning stable government, and well informed citizenry? No. So, Texas most likely won this investment by loads of tax incentives, side deals, offers to cut red tape (like those pesky environmental impact reports), and massive, massive graft. I guarantee that in the future we're going to read about how this particular investment is an environmental nightmare, in the end cost taxpayers billions, added little to the economy and only benefit was to make a few local politicians insanely wealthy. Remember, Texas went to the supreme court in an attempt to INVALIDATE the democratic votes of other states. They are barely part of the US any more, so I don't even consider this a win on a national basis. I really hope Samsung pulls out of the deal.
- fovc 5y agoWhy do big investments get tax breaks but not smaller ones? Is there a rationale other than ~~corruption~~ political power having great economies of scale?
- RandallBrown 5y agoI think that small businesses already get tax breaks compared to big businesses. In a lot of cases I'm sure their profits are small enough they don't pay any taxes at all.
- dylan604 5y agoI wonder if FoxCon is seeing other fabs commiting to US development like this and wonder if they should too rather than just the con job they pulled? Would the current trends influence them to go ahead and start moving forward on the deal they made?
- sweetbitter 5y agoGreat, but how could it be verified that the NSA is not adding a backdoor to every one of these processors? Could anyone explain how easy it would be for them to compromise it in this manner?
- frellus 5y agoLet's be clear why this is happening though, and where the credit is due: Trump's push for on-shore manufacturing, Gov. Abbot, and the attractiveness of Texas for a plant and FDI. $17B and 2,000 jobs and, even more importantly, one less dependency put in China. Democrats would probably want to do years of environmental reviews. That's why you won't see anyone putting manufacturing in California anytime soon.
- paxys 5y agoCalifornia has a wide lead (over 10% share in the US) in the industrial sector, so this narrative is false. More factories are still set up in California today than Texas.
- eximius 5y agoNobody is against on-shore manufacturing and the infrastructure bill will probably assist in the construction of this, not to mention gov private business subsidies being a massive point of hypocrisy for the GOP.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- esalman 5y agoTexas is the size of 4 Bangladesh's. Why do they have build everything in the vicinity of Austin?
- catillac 5y agoMost of Texas is very remote and hard to attract talent or investment to. Certainly cheaper to put the plant in Uvalde or something, but harder to recruit hard tech talent there.
- dhritzkiv 5y agoMiddle of nowhere Texas is not connected to services, utilities, amenities. The area in the vicinity of Austin is.
- plussed_reader 5y agoHope it doesn't turn out to be another Wisfoxcon in Abbott's Texas.
- vemacs 5y agoNobody mentions the pollution this brings to Texas? Cause it's a lot and Samsung should pay billions to to Texas for the mess they are making and not get public money for destroying it's valuable drinking water.
- VLM 5y agoDoes anyone ever build anything in the big east/west coast cities anymore? Or even the east/west coast states anymore?
- StanislavPetrov 5y agoWith the high taxes, needless and burdensome regulations, cost of labor, and crumbling infrastructure, why would you?
- muzz 5y agoRecently these plants were being built in places like Malaysia. Coastal parts of the US became far to expensive for this kind of manufacturing many decades ago.
- pangolinplayer 5y agoAmerica first
- muzz 5y ago"with a $27 million grant from the state of Texas. Larger tax breaks and incentives are expected for the facility." Every time a company expands in Texas there seems to be a tax break involved