Samsung still is cleaning up the mess related to the Galaxy Note 7 recall. Nevertheless, it is also ramping up its mobile chip manufacturing plant in Austin, Texas with more than $1 billion.
This investment will be used in the expansion of its semiconductor production for electronic devices starting early next year.
Samsung not only manufactures the Exynos chipsets that go into its smartphones but also produces semiconductors for memory, batteries, and storage. In fact, majority of the components found in the popular Galaxy S7 phones were made in Samsung factories.
Meanwhile, Samsung discontinued production and sales of its flagship Galaxy Note 7 because of battery-cell and explosion problems, which led to the devices overheating and catching fire in different cases across the world. But it seems that it will not be halting plans on expanding mobile chip production.
Other companies such as GlobalFoundries and Intel also have production plants in the United States. Intel recently signed a contract to make ARM-based mobile device chipsets and will be making smartphone chips for several LG handsets in U.S. factories.
Chip makers are also planning to allocate more resources to chips for IoT gadgets by 2020. Samsung already provides Artik IoT boards with processors, wireless components, and memory.
Much of Samsung's production happens in South Korea. But it opened its Austin production factory in 2007 initially to manufacture NAND flash chips. It invested $3.5 billion then to get the plant going.
The Austin plant presently occupies 2.3 million square feet with 3,000 workers employed. But Samsung is also planning to hire about 500 workers more as it increases production to meet the public's growing need for electronic and mobile devices.
Samsung Austin reported investing at least $16 billion to expand and maintain its local operations since the chip production plant was established. In 2012, it announced plans to pour in $4 billion locally to bolster its chip manufacturing for smartphones and tablet computers, mostly for Apple's iPhones and iPads.
Samsung is currently the second biggest chipmaker in the world behind Intel. Samsung's investment comes after it reported its 2016 capital expenses amounting to 27 trillion won or $24 billion; 13.2 trillion won of which was allocated to semiconductor production.
Majority of the company's semiconductor profits came from its memory chip sales. Despite that, it still is trying to increase earnings from other products, including the Exynos mobile chipsets and its production contracts with Qualcomm and Nvidia.
Samsung has not given more details regarding its mobile chip production investment plans in Austin.
