US promises Samsung $6.4B to build more chips on US soil, which only increases the chance of a Made in USA GPU at some point
The US government has announced it will hand $6.4B to Samsung, in a bid to get more advanced chips produced on US soil. The company, headquartered in South Korea, is currently in the process of building chipmaking facilities, including a fab and packaging plant, in Taylor, Texas and this big influx of cash hopes to convince it to stay in the Lone Star State for the long-term.
"The chips that Samsung will be making in Texas are important components to our most advanced technologies, from artificial intelligence to high-performance computing and 5G communications," Gina Raimondo, US Secretary of Commerce, said. "With President Biden's leadership and Samsung’s commitment to the US, this proposed funding advances America’s leadership in semiconductor manufacturing on the world stage."
The money promised to the South Korean tech giant will part-fund two new cutting-edge fabs, an R&D fab, and an advanced packaging facility in Texas. All of which will join forces with the company's existing facility outside of Austin. The two fabs will focus on 4nm and 2nm process nodes, which will see the new Samsung facilities competing with TSMC and Intel for tiny, efficient chips made on American turf.
Samsung is one of three major chipmaking firms receiving a wad of cash from the US government, and would you believe that $6.6B is actually the lowest amount tentatively awarded to any of them. The others, Intel and TSMC, are set to receive $8.5B and $6.6B, respectively.
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Samsung has been keen to compete with the likes of TSMC for foundry clients, and over the years it has won a few major ones that will be familiar to PC gamers. That includes products as recent as Nvidia's RTX 30-series, which was manufactured on Samsung's 8nm process node, but also a bunch of the entry-level GTX 10-series chips, such as the GTX 1050 Ti.
There's certainly a chance we will receive a graphics card made on US soil by Samsung at some point in the future, though Taiwan's TSMC still holds the contracts to all of today's best GPUs, including those from AMD and Intel. Nvidia, will likely also stick with TSMC for production of its next-gen GPUs, codename Blackwell.
But before we get any sort of 'Made in USA' graphics card, they need to build the fabs first. Samsung expects its Taylor fab to be up-and-running sometime this year, the facility has been in construction since 2022, as a part of a $17B investment. The fab is well on its way, as shown in aerial shots Samsung has published of the site so far.
TSMC and Intel both have major expansion plans in the US, too. All of which the US government hopes will help it claim stake on a larger proportion of the global chipmaking industry—right now, Asia holds onto most of the world's chipmaking facilities, as you can see in the interactive map below.