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South Korea to build world’s largest chip center in Seoul with $230B investment
- recuter 4y ago[flagged]
- amelius 4y agowill -> may
- rapsey 4y agoYou are projecting your own view point into situations that make no sense. Samsung is TSMCs biggest competitor. Their investment in this area is not out of the blue.
- recuter 4y agoI don't have a viewpoint per se. It is just that the size and location of the investment is unusual and comes against the backdrop of geopolitical tensions.
- lifthrasiir 4y agoIf you already have a foothold in South Korea, moving to anywhere south won't give you much safety (especially given NK's, although crude, launch capability). That's why Seoul is so close to the DMZ and still perfectly functioning.
- rapsey 4y agoYou have a viewpoint from the area that you come from. South Korea has a very different viewpoint to yours. Samsung is competing with TSMC, who is ahead and also investing massively. The only surprising thing about this headline is the amount, but makes sense when it is spread out over literally decades.
- em500 4y agoNo comment on the size, but in what world is it unusual for South Koreans to invest and build in South Korea?
- hoseja 4y agoSo we'll have heaps of memory and no compute?
- plouffy 4y agoSurely that number is a misprint ? Or represents an investment over a very long time horizon. 300 trillion won represents 50% of their annual budget. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-24/south-korea-s-parliament-approves-conservative-2023-budget https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-24/south-kor...
- csomar 4y agoThe article says it's a private investment. There seems to be too little details, however, given how large the number is.
- fooker 4y agoSamsung
- lifthrasiir 4y agoApparently $230B over 20 years (see my other comment), so it's a very long-term program.
- bobthepanda 4y agoIt is crazy to me, that this investment will be all in Seoul. It is not very hard to make the case that Seoul is overly concentrated for both politics and the economy at the expense of other areas of South Korea. And as far as security balwark goes, Seoul is only 40km from the DMZ.
- Barrin92 4y agoChip supply chains are some of the most complex things humans have ever built and the amount of skilled work you need is crazy, so it really doesn't make much sense to put it anywhere else. In general also many East-Asian cities don't really suffer from dysfunction and lack of development so agglomeration really has a lot of upsides.
- bobthepanda 4y agoThe cost of housing in Seoul is pretty dysfunctional, as is the general commuting crush: https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.amp.asp?newsIdx=339661 https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.amp.asp?newsIdx=339...
- bsaul 4y agodo you have any good resources i could read on the subject of chip supply chain ? I know absolutely nothing about it
- jiggawatts 4y agoI wish I had ready-to-go URLs I could reference, but the complexity is just stunning. For example, the purity of the feed chemicals has been a key limitation, and steady improvements have been made by suppliers over decades. There are orgs that specialise in things such as shipping ultra pure chemicals in specially cleaned teflon containers. Just trucking and piping this stuff around must have had millions (billions?) of dollars of research sunk into it. You don't get to 99.9999% or better purity while pumping stuff into a dirty old diesel truck's rusty tank! The "tools" themselves are an extra level of crazy. For one, the ASML x-ray ("EUV") laser lithography machines are just an unbelievable piece of precision engineering. If twenty years ago you had told me that we'd have high-power x-ray lasers in an industrial setting with nanometer focusing precision I would have laughed in your face, or assumed that it's a function of a particle accelerator the size of a decent town. I remember seeing an add for a new-generation tool (machine) designed for the permanent vacuum part of the production line. They were proudly showing off their key improvement, which was that its MTBF was something like 7 hours. This was amazing apparently, because both them and their competition couldn't do much better than 40 minutes previously! Think about how demanding the requirements must be that a 40 minute MTBF was state of the art and totally acceptable in large-scale manufacturing, and raising that to "still less than a day" is worthy of advertising in an industry magazine!
- lifthrasiir 4y agoAccording to Money Today [1] the chip center is actually to be located in Yongin, Gyeonggi-do---about a hour away from the center of Seoul. Samsung is the primary investor to this center and will invest 300 trillion won (that's probably where $230B came frome) over next 20 years. [1] https://news.mt.co.kr/mtview.php?no=2023031511112875044 https://news.mt.co.kr/mtview.php?no=2023031511112875044
- Idiot_in_Vain 4y agoThat's a good thing - Yongin is to the south of Seoul, quite far away from the border with North Korea. Out of range of most North Korean artillery.
- bilekas 4y agoWhat a strange comment. Honestly, if this is what you're worried about those few miles/km's wont matter.
- saiya-jin 4y agoIt may matter tremendously if SHTF, as a difference between few missiles that get trough Patriot defenses hitting some random part of fab vs fab looking like Mariupol steel plant or Bakhmut. russian war in Ukraine gives us some very good lessons is east vs west current warfare, if you care to look for them
- KineticLensman 4y agoThey can hardly continue chip production as if nothing had happened if NK is shelling towns 50km to the North.
- avisser 4y agoI don't think "production during the war" is the point. I believe the point GP is making is that production can continue after hostilities cease if and only if the plant is intact. Being beyond the range of 155mm artillery makes that much more likely.
- neom 4y agoMuch better article (in English): https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/tech/2023/03/419_347185.html https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/tech/2023/03/419_347185.htm...
- throwoutway 4y agoFor comparison, South Korea government's budget (that was just approved a few months ago) was $498.89 billion USD. https://www.reuters.com/article/southkorea-economy-budget/south-koreas-parliament-passes-2023-budget-bill-idUSL4N33D2J0 https://www.reuters.com/article/southkorea-economy-budget/so...
- idoubtit 4y agoThis 230 b$ announcement is private funding over 20 years. For a fair comparison, South Korea government's budget is around 500 b$ per year, and this chip center will be funded by circa 10 b$ per year from Samsung (with commodities and tax exemptions granted by the government).
- toldyouso2022 4y agoTaiwan was not near enough to a communist dictatorship, so of course a government will invest to make chips even closer to an even crazier communist dictatorship. And sorry for being political, I guess there are many big brain reasons for this (unironically), but it's funny
- midoridensha 4y agoSo where would you put it exactly? I'm guessing you think it could be put in some rural place in North America where there's no infrastructure and no workforce...
- toldyouso2022 4y agoThere is a city called Busan, that is 350km from North Korea instead of 40km. In case Kim decides to do the stupid, it makes a difference.
- midoridensha 4y agoSeoul is 40km from the border, right? This plant isn't being located in Seoul, despite what the stupid headline says. Anyway, NK has no trouble launching ballistic missiles over Japan at this point, so I'm not sure a few hundred km really makes a big difference.
- cholantesh 4y agoOr alternatively, in a country where doing any kind of labour organizing is liable to get you jailed and where a 70-hour working week is about to be enshrined in law.
- midoridensha 4y agoThey're already walking that one back because younger people are screaming about it.
- NineStarPoint 4y ago
- optimalsolver 4y agoWith a cratering population, who exactly is going to be working at that chip center?
- sgu999 4y agoI think it's already mostly immigrants working in TSMC's Taiwanese foundries. I don't see it being very different in the US either as the wages are unlikely to be much higher than where the chips are currently made in Asia.
- wil421 4y agoNot sure if that will be the case. I’d imagine they would pull from the same pool as auto manufacturers and other “anyone can apply” plant/manufacturing jobs. It looks like a FAB worker makes about $36k. In my state the average UAW yearly income is about the same, in Arizona it’s $46k.[1] Some google searches says a fab worker in Taiwan makes about $17k. [1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-UAW-Salary-by-State https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-UA...
- sgu999 4y ago> I’d imagine they would pull from the same pool as auto manufacturers and other “anyone can apply” plant/manufacturing jobs. What is this pool? The cost of living in the US is (according to my very lazy Google search) about 4 times as high as in Taiwan on average. From what I understand from afar (I'm in the EU), $36k/year really isn't enough to buy a good quality of life in the US. I don't see anyone but those who have very little bargaining power working in these fabs... My point was that whether it's the US, South Korea or Taiwan, the pool of available workers is probably the same and I suspect the birth rate of the country has very little impact on it.
- kilroy123 4y agoMore and more automation, I would assume.
- DeathArrow 4y ago[flagged]
- igravious 4y ago“The concentration of so much crucial chip manufacturing in just two places has caused concerns over global supply chain stability especially as South Korea and Taiwan are both militarily threatened by neighbors, North Korea and China respectively.” Always with the Western bias. If anything, given that there are U.S. troops in South Korea 10,000km and across an ocean from the U.S. mainland who is militarily threatening who? Long term Korea will be reunited, one hopes without conflict. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_conflict “The Korean conflict is an ongoing conflict based on the division of Korea between North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) and South Korea (Republic of Korea), both of which claim to be the sole legitimate government of all of Korea. During the Cold War, North Korea was backed by the Soviet Union, China, and other allies, while South Korea was backed by the United States, United Kingdom, and other Western allies. The division of Korea by the United States and the Soviet Union occurred in 1945. […] The U.S. maintains a military presence in the South to assist South Korea in accordance with the ROK–U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty. In 1997, U.S. President Bill Clinton described the division of Korea as the "Cold War's last divide".” As for Taiwan the cornerstone of U.S.–China relations is the one-China policy, a policy which officially states that the China–Taiwan problem is an internal Chinese problem – whatever you think about the status of the tensions between the mainland and the island is irrelevant, I'm talking about official U.S. foreign policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Communiqu%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Communiqu%C3%A9 “The United States formally acknowledged that "all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China".” As such the U.S. is violating this policy by having troops stationed in Taiwan, by expanding that troop presence, and by the constant shuttling back-and-forth of high level politicians. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/07/nancy-pelosi-taiwan-china-visit-military https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/07/nancy-pelosi... https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-to-expand-troop-presence-in-taiwan-for-training-against-china-threat-62198a83 https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-to-expand-troop-presence-in... Both North Korea and China have recently warned the U.S. about this behavior of stoking tension far far from its border. https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-us-military-drills-missile-tests-f7ca4b6a19e4aecf2205950ced0e00db https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-us-military-drills-mi... https://apnews.com/article/china-congress-2023-qin-us-1938a701c0d7a2114a18226962de4879 https://apnews.com/article/china-congress-2023-qin-us-1938a7... === My point is. Why does CNN insist on this throwaway paragraph when we all know that there are (at least) two sides to every conflict (if there weren't by definition we wouldn't have a conflict)? It is saddening that only the Western perspective is given. Why has mainstream establishment journalism in the West given up all pretenses to an unbiased neutral point of view? The same goes for HN. I know this is a U.S.-centric site but what people say on here regarding China and Russia is myopic and jingoistic most of the time, as are the articles linked to. All you have to do is search for the terms "Russia" and "China" and sort by recent date to be confronted with comment after comment and page after page of repulsive Western chauvinism. Like it or not these are nuclear superpowers and we have to share the planet with them. The sooner the United States government and its people acknowledge this reality and step away from the constant brinkmanship and "national security" hypocrisy. The conflict in Ukraine is testament that the rest of the world has had enough of the West's arrogance.
- ar9av 4y agoThere is a difference between creating a wafer with more chips on it than scaling up production of said wafers to be profitable. Think of it like producing cars. Many people can make cars, and on a small production scale. It's an entirely different ballgame for mass production.
- bilekas 4y agoIt wasn't proposed as a immediate replacement of the current world model though. This is like saying those new car manufacturers shouldn't bother because they'll never make then as fast and at high scale as the already established ?
- newaccount2023 4y agowe are well on our way to a mega-bust in chip fab investment even if all the fabs are actually built to completion, all you get is the value of ICs plummeting
- yucky 4y agoIt's clear that the entire world has come to terms with the fact that it's not a matter of if Taiwan will be absorbed in to China, but when.
- CuriouslyC 4y agoNot so much. If we believe there is a 20% chance that Taiwan gets annexed, but the result of that would be catastrophic in terms of access to the chips that are the life blood of the modern world, it would make sense to prepare for that eventuality even if it weren't the most probable outcome, assuming the cost of that preparation is affordable.
- eggy 4y agoSo that's about 2.3x more money in 20 years than the U.S. plans to spend on the plant in Ohio that will supposedly create 50,000 jobs. The minimum wage is $10.10 in Ohio vs. $7.28 with the latest increase in South Korea for 2023. That's almost 1.5x more wages for workers in Ohio. And I wouldn't say we had the edge on chip manufacturing vs. S. Korea, so given the numbers above, how can the U.S. compete? What chips are we making vs. what is intended to be made in S. Korea?
- htag 4y agoSemiconductor manufacturing is not a zero sum game. We can increase the market by increasing the supply, and there are plenty of niches in the market for each manufacture to habit. More chips being produced is a net good for the world. I am more concerned that the chips are being used for something better than telemetry spyware or ad-tech spam than which stable democracy they are produced in.
- rdevsrex 4y agoCall me cynical, but I view the subsidies for these new US fabs as hedge against loosing production in Taiwan in the event of a war with China. That small price delta will be nothing if that happens.
- marnett 4y agoThat is not being cynical; that’s geopolitics!
- kibwen 4y agoPoliticians of every nation increasingly understand that domestic chip production is a matter of national security (if not outright national sovereignty). In the long term, the upper bound on funds for chip production is "the entire defense spending budget".
- flakeoil 4y agoA semiconductor fab does not require that many people so the wages should not matter that much. And the relative amount invested is probably not that important. For the US it's important that there is at least some fairly high volume produced of the latest manufacturing nodes. Right now nothing is produced in the US of the latest node, as they are manufactured in Taiwan and South Korea.