SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
TSMC to Spend $100B on Fabs and R&D Over Next Three Years: 2nm, Arizona Fab & More
TSMC this week has announced plans to spend $100 billion on new production facilities as well as R&D over the next three years. The world's largest contract maker of chips says that its fabs are currently working at full load, so to meet demand for its services going forward it will need (much) more capacity. Among TSMC's facilities to go online in the next three to four years are the company's fab in Arizona as well as its first 2nm-capable fab in Taiwan.
[...] TSMC's capital expenditures (CapEx) budget last year was $17.2 billion, whereas its R&D budget was $3.72 billion, or approximately 8.2% of its revenue. This year the company intends to increase its CapEx to somewhere in the range of $25 to $28 billion, which would make for a 45% to 62% year-over-year increase in that spending. The company's R&D spending will also rise as its revenue is expected to grow. In total, TSMC plans to invest around $30 billion or more on CapEx and R&D this year. Taken altogether, if the company intends to spend around $100 billion from 2021 through 2023, its expenditures in the next two years will be roughly flat with 2021, something that should please its investors.
SK Hynix to Build $106 Billion Fab Cluster: 800,000 Wafer Starts a Month
Capping off a busy week for fab-related news, South Korea authorities this week gave SK Hynix a green light to build a new, 120 trillion won ($106.35 billion) fab complex. The fab cluster will be primarily used to build DRAM for PCs, mobile devices, and servers, using process technologies that rely on extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). The first fab in the complex will go online in 2025.
[...] The new fabs will be used to make various types of DRAM using SK Hynix's upcoming production technologies that will use extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. And with a start date still years away, we're likely looking at a fab that will be used to manufacture DDR5, LPDDR5X, and other future types of DRAM.
See also: TSMC bumps spending up 50% to meet increased demand
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 04 2021, @03:21PM (1 child)
i suppose i am just an "outlier" but the last time i bought a "chip" was probably when i bought a new toyota 2 years ago. and before that a micro wifi access point from tp-link (5Ghz ac)
since then i haven't bought anything "chip-like"...
so i am wondering where this increase in demand is coming from.
technically speaking there are plenty chips in a modern combustion engine car and tho the ones in a pure electrical car are different i see no reason why there need to be more of them chips in a electrical car ... so purely by " weight", having manufacturers scramble to get a piece of the tesla cake, electrical car manufacturing ain't the reason for chip short supply.
maybe it's coming from the "trade war" the previous pres has escalated, rather?
or, vague, a cessation of subsidies from the chinese government to small chinese chip manufacturers (woot? didnt make the news)?
however ... maybe it's not "chips" per se, but rather power electronics ... semi conductor stuff that works in the 500+ volt and 100+/amp range that is really in short supply (which would mean it's the car industry but not for the entertainment console or gps).
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday April 04 2021, @03:38PM
You mention Tesla. They use the usual chips as well as a self-driving chip [electrek.co] and a 10 teraflops Navi 23 GPU [tesmanian.com] for in-car gaming.
The major "driver" for new TSMC fabs is Apple. They want a new node roughly every year, even if it only offers minor improvements on the previous node ("4nm" is a good example [wccftech.com]). Those chips go into iPhone, iPad, and soon all of the Mac lineup.
Chinese companies (that aren't banned due to military links or geopolitics) still rely on TSMC. The latest example is this big GPU [tomshardware.com].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]