Korean technology giant Samsung has annouced that it will start building a NAND memory production plant in the city of Xian, western China. The plant is the second overseas memory production facility for Samsung, the company has another plant in Austin, Texas. It will be build in two stages, where the first one will have a floor area of 448,000 square meters, the second stage will expand this to 1M square meters. The plant costs a whopping $7 billion to build.
Samsung expects that the demand of NAND flash memory will continue to grow and with the move to China the company hopes to be close to its customers. In China 80% of all computers and 50% of all mobile phones are produced, which all use flash memory. Samsung also announced that when the production facility is ready in 2014, it will output 10nm NAND flash chips, where currently 19nm chips are common.
In Xian there are 80 universities and colleges and around 100 research institutes, which turn out more than 17,000 IT graduates annually. The area already hosts tech giants such as Qualcomm, GE, Erisson, NEC, ZTE and Huawei, all potential customers of the new factory.
Of course we can't wait to try out 10nm SSDs...
