When an industry experiences a major slowdown, large companies tend to slow down mid- to long-term capacity-related investments. This is exactly what happened with SK Hynix’s Yongin Semiconductor Cluster, a $106 billion project announced in April 2021. According to South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, while development of the site is largely complete, the initial shell building is only 35% complete.
South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy wrote in a statement: “So far, Plant No. 1 has been about 35% complete, and on-site renovation is progressing smoothly.” “By 2046, more than 120 trillion won (today’s US$90 billion (US$106 billion in 2021) investment to complete Fab 1 to Fab 4, and construction of the production line for Fab 1 will begin in March next year. Once completed, the infrastructure will rank among the largest three-tier fabs in the world .”
The new semiconductor manufacturing cluster announced by SK Hynix almost three years ago will be mainly used to manufacture DRAM for PCs, mobile devices and servers using advanced extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) process technology. The cluster is located near Yongin City in South Korea and is planned to consist of four large-scale wafer fabs covering an area of 4.15 million square meters.2 Place. The plant has a planned capacity of approximately 800,000 wafers per month (WSPM) and will become one of the largest semiconductor production centers in the world.
Still, SK Hynix’s construction progress has been slower than the company initially expected. The complex’s first fab was originally scheduled to come online in 2025, with construction starting in the fourth quarter of 2021. However, SK Hynix began to cut capital expenditures in the second half of 2022, and the Yongin semiconductor cluster project declined sharply. Victim of that cutting. To be sure, development of the site continues, albeit at a slower pace. That’s why the first fab enclosure is currently about 35% built.
According to the 2021 report, if completed as planned in 2021, the first phase of SK Hynix’s Yongin plant will be a $25 billion major memory production facility equipped with EUV tools and a capacity of 200,000-WSPM.
Source: Korea Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy; Computer Base