Samsung Electronics said it will proceed with a $3.9 billion investment to expand its chipset production facility in Austin, Texas.
According to Reuters, the investment will be used to expand system-chip production lines. Samsung manufactures many of the chips that go into Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) products like the iPhone, though Apple designs the silicon in-house.
The investment is not exactly a surprise though. Reuters reported in August that Samsung was looking to finalize the investment into expanded chip production in Texas. The Austin facility reached its current full production level in December 2011 and Reuters had reported then that nearly all of the non-memory output at the 1.6 million-square-foot plant is dedicated to Apple chips. (Samsung also produces NAND flash memory chips in Austin.)
According to research firm Strategy Analytics, Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) led the smartphone application processor market in both unit and revenue terms in the first half of 2011. Samsung, MediaTek, Broadcom and Texas Instruments, in that order, took the rest of the top five rankings.
Meanwhile, according to a Wired report, Apple is breaking ground in Austin on a new 39-acre campus that will eventually house the company's America's Operations Center. The report noted that Apple already has an operations center in Austin, which employs about 3,500 hardware engineers, support staff and operations employees. However, the new campus will add another 1 million square feet of office space and within 10 years could bring in another 3,600 jobs for the company.
"The company requires an operational center to centralize various functions, such as accounting, human resources and finance," Apple wrote in a plan for the $287 million project, filed with city planners, the report said.
For more:
- see this Reuters article
- see this Wired article
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