Samsung announced that it is investing $4 billion in its Austin plant in order to expand the production capacity of processors for mobile devices. Trial or not, Samsung’s most important client for those chips is still Apple. The factory already manufactures flash memory chips and the Apple-designed A5, which debuted with the iPad 2 and was improved with the iPad 3.
The sum will be used to retrofit the existing installations and to entirely devote the production lines to system chips. It represents the largest foreign investment in Texas of all time. Mass production will begin in the second half of 2013.
Since 1996, Samsung has invested over $13 billion in its Austin plant and has become the world’s second-largest chip company after Intel. They did not state whether the production capacity will be affected during the work.
The commercial agreement between Apple and Samsung is unknown and could span multiple years. In all cases, Samsung seems confident in the future when it comes to its chips production.