Samsung Electronics Co and Texas Instruments Inc completed final agreements to get billions of US dollars of government support for new semiconductor plants in the US, cementing a major piece of US President Joe Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act initiative.
Under binding agreements unveiled Friday, Samsung would get as much as US$4.75 billion in funding, while Texas Instruments stands to receive US$1.6 billion — money that would help them build facilities in Texas and Utah. The final deals mean the chipmakers can begin collecting the funding when their projects hit certain benchmarks.
Though the terms of Texas Instruments’ final agreement is in line with a preliminary deal, Samsung is getting substantially less than originally expected.
Photo: Reuters
“Our mid-to-long-term investment plan has been partially revised to optimize overall investment efficiency,” Samsung said in a statement, indicating that its project would not be as large as originally planned.
The CHIPS Act, signed into law by Biden in 2022, set aside US$39 billion in grants, loans and loan guarantees worth US$75 billion and 25 percent tax credits. It aims to boost US semiconductor production after decades of manufacturing shifting abroad.
Officials have divvied up most of that money, with US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo racing to finalize as many deals as possible before leaving office.
The latest awards round out the program’s biggest grants, helping ensure that there is comprehensive local production of semiconductors. Texas Instruments is the largest maker of analog chips and embedded processors. Samsung is the world’s top maker of memory chips and a major provider of advanced outsourced production for other companies.
China has boosted its manufacturing capacity of analog and embedded chips, attempting to be more self-reliant in this vital area. That has made it all the more important for the US to do the same.
In a separate announcement, the US Department of Commerce also firmed up plans to deliver US$407 million in direct funding to Amkor Technology Inc. The money would support that company’s investment in Arizona, where it is building more capacity for what is called advanced packaging.
Texas Instruments’ award would help fund three new large plants: two in Sherman, Texas, and one in Lehi, Utah. They would create 2,000 new positions for the Dallas-based company, it said.
Samsung is expanding its facilities in central Texas. That would include work on so-called logic chips — components that act as the brains of systems — and a research and design facility in Taylor. The company also would be expanding an existing site in Austin.
Texas Instruments has said it plans to spend about US$40 billion to build five new US factories: one in Utah and four in Texas. The government funding supports just the first two Texas factories, since officials are prioritizing projects that would be in production by the end of the decade.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
RSS