Friday, April 2nd 2021
SK Hynix to Build $106 Billion Mega Factory in South Korea
Today, we are getting a report coming from the South Korean press, stating that the country of South Korea has just given SK Hynix the green light to start building the mega factory complex. Being in the planning phase for a long time, the new mega factory is going to be located in Yongin, a city set 50 km south of the capital Seoul. The company expects to break ground with construction in Q4 of this year, and finish everything and start volume production of DRAM in 2025. When it comes to the size of the new mega factory, the plant is going to have an area of 4.15 million square meters.
The total cost of it will be about $106 billion worth of investment from SK Hynix, making all the recent fab construction plans look tiny compared to this massive investment. The mega factory complex would consist out of four fabs, where their total wafer per month output would be around 800,000. These foundries will be in charge of producing regular DRAM, and next-generation DRAM technologies like we have talked about just a few days ago. It remains to be seen what the company will come out with in the future, however, we are watching its moves closely.
Source:
via ComputerBase.de
The total cost of it will be about $106 billion worth of investment from SK Hynix, making all the recent fab construction plans look tiny compared to this massive investment. The mega factory complex would consist out of four fabs, where their total wafer per month output would be around 800,000. These foundries will be in charge of producing regular DRAM, and next-generation DRAM technologies like we have talked about just a few days ago. It remains to be seen what the company will come out with in the future, however, we are watching its moves closely.
18 Comments on SK Hynix to Build $106 Billion Mega Factory in South Korea
4,150,000 square meters is 1,026 acers. This would make the building about 2.5X the largest building in the world.
And this project would cost about 4X the total revenue (not profit, the revenue) of SK Hynix in 2020.
In fact, this project at 106B would cost more than the sum total of all of S Korea's semiconductor exports in 2020, from all manufacturers.
I see the story from a lot of reputable sources but I'm wondering if someone mixed up some of the details.
Anyway, I did find that the 1000 acers is the size of the site, not the building floor space.
I still don't get the 106B investment by a company that takes in about $25B/year in revenue and makes maybe $3-$4B profit - based on their record Q4 2020 profit of about $860M USD. That's like someone who makes $3.40 per year income, saying they are going to invest $106,000 on something.
But given the 800,000 wafers/month start rate, that is only about 10-20% under the entire capacity of Intel, so $100B would probably be about right. I wonder where their money is coming from.