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.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market