[HN Gopher] South Korea to build world's largest chip center in ...
___________________________________________________________________
South Korea to build world's largest chip center in Seoul with
$230B investment
Author : rayval
Score : 212 points
Date : 2023-03-15 07:05 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| eggy wrote:
| So that's about 2.3x more money in 20 years than the U.S. plans
| to spend on the plant in Ohio that will supposedly create 50,000
| jobs.
|
| The minimum wage is $10.10 in Ohio vs. $7.28 with the latest
| increase in South Korea for 2023. That's almost 1.5x more wages
| for workers in Ohio.
|
| And I wouldn't say we had the edge on chip manufacturing vs. S.
| Korea, so given the numbers above, how can the U.S. compete? What
| chips are we making vs. what is intended to be made in S. Korea?
| Beached wrote:
| USA can compete on quality and supply chain assurance. I'm not
| saying that SK chips are poor quality, but I imagine that a
| more expensive chip, or more expensive device is a small price
| to pay for reliable, accountable, and implant free assurance to
| the military or itar compliant corps.
|
| also in the new and upcoming space age that is budding, quality
| assurance is a number one concern.
| htag wrote:
| Semiconductor manufacturing is not a zero sum game. We can
| increase the market by increasing the supply, and there are
| plenty of niches in the market for each manufacture to habit.
| More chips being produced is a net good for the world. I am
| more concerned that the chips are being used for something
| better than telemetry spyware or ad-tech spam than which stable
| democracy they are produced in.
| rdevsrex wrote:
| Call me cynical, but I view the subsidies for these new US fabs
| as hedge against loosing production in Taiwan in the event of a
| war with China.
|
| That small price delta will be nothing if that happens.
| marnett wrote:
| That is not being cynical; that's geopolitics!
| kibwen wrote:
| Politicians of every nation increasingly understand that
| domestic chip production is a matter of national security (if
| not outright national sovereignty). In the long term, the upper
| bound on funds for chip production is "the entire defense
| spending budget".
| flakeoil wrote:
| A semiconductor fab does not require that many people so the
| wages should not matter that much.
|
| And the relative amount invested is probably not that
| important. For the US it's important that there is at least
| some fairly high volume produced of the latest manufacturing
| nodes.
|
| Right now nothing is produced in the US of the latest node, as
| they are manufactured in Taiwan and South Korea.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| > fairly high volume produced of the latest manufacturing
| nodes
|
| By the time a fab is completed, it is often no longer in the
| "latest manufacturing nodes", specifically when it was not in
| the "latest manufacturing nodes" even at planning stages.
| datpiff wrote:
| > A semiconductor fab does not require that many people so
| the wages should not matter that much.
|
| Likely thousands to tens-of-thousands of employees on-site at
| all times for fabs of this size.
|
| Most employees in the US won't be earning minimum wages, that
| hasn't been the case in the past.
| flakeoil wrote:
| Whatever the number, relatively speaking, it's basically
| peanuts compared to the number and value of the wafers and
| chips they are spitting out.
|
| It's advanced machines doing most of it, and there is an
| operator handling each machine. The machines are extremely
| expensive, the building is extremely expensive, the
| ventilation/filtration/air control system is expensive etc.
|
| These are not smartphone factories.
|
| What is expensive is running these fabs/lines at half the
| capacity.
| cm2012 wrote:
| South Korea is an ally, its almost just as good for them to
| make semiconductors as us. Anywhere but China, really.
| ar9av wrote:
| There is a difference between creating a wafer with more chips on
| it than scaling up production of said wafers to be profitable.
| Think of it like producing cars. Many people can make cars, and
| on a small production scale. It's an entirely different ballgame
| for mass production.
| bilekas wrote:
| It wasn't proposed as a immediate replacement of the current
| world model though.
|
| This is like saying those new car manufacturers shouldn't
| bother because they'll never make then as fast and at high
| scale as the already established ?
| yucky wrote:
| It's clear that the entire world has come to terms with the fact
| that it's not a matter of if Taiwan will be absorbed in to China,
| but when.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Not so much. If we believe there is a 20% chance that Taiwan
| gets annexed, but the result of that would be catastrophic in
| terms of access to the chips that are the life blood of the
| modern world, it would make sense to prepare for that
| eventuality even if it weren't the most probable outcome,
| assuming the cost of that preparation is affordable.
| throwoutway wrote:
| For comparison, South Korea government's budget (that was just
| approved a few months ago) was $498.89 billion USD.
| https://www.reuters.com/article/southkorea-economy-budget/so...
| idoubtit wrote:
| This 230 b$ announcement is private funding over 20 years.
|
| For a fair comparison, South Korea government's budget is
| around 500 b$ per year, and this chip center will be funded by
| circa 10 b$ per year from Samsung (with commodities and tax
| exemptions granted by the government).
| toldyouso2022 wrote:
| Taiwan was not near enough to a communist dictatorship, so of
| course a government will invest to make chips even closer to an
| even crazier communist dictatorship.
|
| And sorry for being political, I guess there are many big brain
| reasons for this (unironically), but it's funny
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| Samsung is a South Korean company so...of course they'll build
| it in South Korea? Not really any reasonable places to build
| such a project in SK without being close to their local crazy
| communist dictatorship.
| midoridensha wrote:
| So where would you put it exactly? I'm guessing you think it
| could be put in some rural place in North America where there's
| no infrastructure and no workforce...
| cholantesh wrote:
| Or alternatively, in a country where doing any kind of labour
| organizing is liable to get you jailed and where a 70-hour
| working week is about to be enshrined in law.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| With a cratering population, who exactly is going to be working
| at that chip center?
| kilroy123 wrote:
| More and more automation, I would assume.
| sgu999 wrote:
| I think it's already mostly immigrants working in TSMC's
| Taiwanese foundries. I don't see it being very different in the
| US either as the wages are unlikely to be much higher than
| where the chips are currently made in Asia.
| wil421 wrote:
| Not sure if that will be the case. I'd imagine they would
| pull from the same pool as auto manufacturers and other
| "anyone can apply" plant/manufacturing jobs.
|
| It looks like a FAB worker makes about $36k. In my state the
| average UAW yearly income is about the same, in Arizona it's
| $46k.[1]
|
| Some google searches says a fab worker in Taiwan makes about
| $17k.
|
| [1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-
| Average-UA...
| sgu999 wrote:
| > I'd imagine they would pull from the same pool as auto
| manufacturers and other "anyone can apply"
| plant/manufacturing jobs.
|
| What is this pool?
|
| The cost of living in the US is (according to my very lazy
| Google search) about 4 times as high as in Taiwan on
| average. From what I understand from afar (I'm in the EU),
| $36k/year really isn't enough to buy a good quality of life
| in the US. I don't see anyone but those who have very
| little bargaining power working in these fabs...
|
| My point was that whether it's the US, South Korea or
| Taiwan, the pool of available workers is probably the same
| and I suspect the birth rate of the country has very little
| impact on it.
| recuter wrote:
| Sounds like the Korean government concluded Taiwan will be
| invaded. :/
| amelius wrote:
| will -> may
| geenew wrote:
| s/\(\w*\)\([ ->]*\)\(\w*\)$/s\/\1\/\3/
| amelius wrote:
| I liked my syntax better ;)
| [deleted]
| hoseja wrote:
| So we'll have heaps of memory and no compute?
| rapsey wrote:
| You are projecting your own view point into situations that
| make no sense.
|
| Samsung is TSMCs biggest competitor. Their investment in this
| area is not out of the blue.
| recuter wrote:
| I don't have a viewpoint per se. It is just that the size and
| location of the investment is unusual and comes against the
| backdrop of geopolitical tensions.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| If you already have a foothold in South Korea, moving to
| anywhere south won't give you much safety (especially given
| NK's, although crude, launch capability). That's why Seoul
| is so close to the DMZ and still perfectly functioning.
| em500 wrote:
| No comment on the size, but in what world is it unusual for
| South Koreans to invest and build in South Korea?
| recuter wrote:
| The amount seems unprecedented and the timing. I
| understand competing for marketshare with TSMC, but it
| made me think like they are scrambling in case TSMC
| suddenly goes poof.
| rapsey wrote:
| Why would they scramble. They would have the market to
| themselves.
| rapsey wrote:
| You have a viewpoint from the area that you come from.
| South Korea has a very different viewpoint to yours.
| Samsung is competing with TSMC, who is ahead and also
| investing massively. The only surprising thing about this
| headline is the amount, but makes sense when it is spread
| out over literally decades.
| newaccount2023 wrote:
| we are well on our way to a mega-bust in chip fab investment
|
| even if all the fabs are actually built to completion, all you
| get is the value of ICs plummeting
| plouffy wrote:
| Surely that number is a misprint ? Or represents an investment
| over a very long time horizon. 300 trillion won represents 50% of
| their annual budget.
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-24/south-kor...
| csomar wrote:
| The article says it's a private investment. There seems to be
| too little details, however, given how large the number is.
| fooker wrote:
| Samsung
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Apparently $230B over 20 years (see my other comment), so it's
| a very long-term program.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| It is crazy to me, that this investment will be all in Seoul.
|
| It is not very hard to make the case that Seoul is overly
| concentrated for both politics and the economy at the expense of
| other areas of South Korea. And as far as security balwark goes,
| Seoul is only 40km from the DMZ.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Chip supply chains are some of the most complex things humans
| have ever built and the amount of skilled work you need is
| crazy, so it really doesn't make much sense to put it anywhere
| else.
|
| In general also many East-Asian cities don't really suffer from
| dysfunction and lack of development so agglomeration really has
| a lot of upsides.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The cost of housing in Seoul is pretty dysfunctional, as is
| the general commuting crush: https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages
| /article.amp.asp?newsIdx=339...
| bsaul wrote:
| do you have any good resources i could read on the subject of
| chip supply chain ? I know absolutely nothing about it
| rdl wrote:
| Asianometry youtube/substack/etc.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I wish I had ready-to-go URLs I could reference, but the
| complexity is just stunning. For example, the purity of the
| feed chemicals has been a key limitation, and steady
| improvements have been made by suppliers over decades.
| There are orgs that specialise in things such as shipping
| ultra pure chemicals in specially cleaned teflon
| containers. Just _trucking_ and piping this stuff around
| must have had millions (billions?) of dollars of research
| sunk into it. You don 't get to 99.9999% or better purity
| while pumping stuff into a dirty old diesel truck's rusty
| tank!
|
| The "tools" themselves are an extra level of crazy. For
| one, the ASML x-ray ("EUV") laser lithography machines are
| just an unbelievable piece of precision engineering. If
| twenty years ago you had told me that we'd have high-power
| x-ray lasers in an industrial setting with nanometer
| focusing precision I would have laughed in your face, or
| assumed that it's a function of a particle accelerator the
| size of a decent town.
|
| I remember seeing an add for a new-generation tool
| (machine) designed for the permanent vacuum part of the
| production line. They were proudly showing off their key
| improvement, which was that its MTBF was something like 7
| hours. This was _amazing_ apparently, because both them and
| their competition couldn 't do much better than 40 minutes
| previously!
|
| Think about how demanding the requirements must be that a
| 40 minute MTBF was _state of the art_ and totally
| acceptable in large-scale manufacturing, and raising that
| to "still less than a day" is worthy of advertising in an
| industry magazine!
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Leaving aside the DMZ/NK Risk... Cities work. Bigger cities
| work better than smaller cities. They're cheaper, cleaner,
| greener, more productive, with better health and social
| outcomes and more access to education etc etc etc.
|
| That's why basically any large project basically NEED to be
| within X minutes of a major city. The saving in land cost
| setting it up in a rural area is nothing compared to having no
| staff, no services, no infrastructure, local political problems
| etc.
| AdamN wrote:
| For fabs it seems like just a bit outside of a city is the
| optimum location. Chandler (Phoenix) for Intel's new fab and
| outside of Portland for the other US ones. I expect it's
| similar in Taiwan and South Korea.
|
| Side note but isn't water a critical input for a fab?
| Arizona's water problems are going to continue to get worse
| so this seems like a bad move by Intel.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Yeah, it makes sense to put it not in the centre but within
| (say) 1h of the centre. Then you can recruit from an 8
| figure workforce including multiple universities, offer a
| huge list of places to live and amenities to workers, meet
| reliability with everyone from regulators to ambassadors to
| investors to lawyers, have gold standard infrastructure,
| etc.
|
| I'm never sure when it comes to water. I think a lot of
| places in the west chose to have shortages by refusing to
| build infrastructure and wasting supply on subsidizing
| things like (export orientated, unnecessarily high water
| use forms of) agriculture. But I am no expert...
| bobthepanda wrote:
| There is more than one city in South Korea.
|
| Over half of South Koreans live in the Seoul Capital Area.
| That's a much higher proportion than countries other people
| often accuse of being overcentralized and neglecting the
| regions, like the UK with London or France with Paris.
|
| And to some degree what you describe is a self fulfilling
| prophecy; big cities hollowing out the smaller ones,
| shrinking their economies and leaving their governments in
| deficit and the services worse, rinse and repeat.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| It's not a value judgement, it's just life. Villages should
| shrink to feed towns which should shrink to feed cities
| which should shrink to feed the largest regional
| conurbation. Trying to force the flow backwards like the UK
| does just makes everyone poorer and leads to worse outcomes
| in social terms.
|
| Bigger cities are just more efficient and effective.
| bilekas wrote:
| Really not sure why this is being downvoted so much.
|
| I will say that you might have the cart before the horse,
| cities are a product of the efficiencies / benefits.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| There isn't any good reason why the outlying regions of
| the UK should have lower GDP per capita than Eastern
| Europe.
|
| Seoul is extremely large, at 26M. Reversing even some of
| the flow would largely still be aiming at million plus
| cities in South Korea, of which there are five outside
| the Seoul Capital Area.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| How does moving people from high productivity jobs in
| high productivity regions to low/low ones help anyone?
| That's the question here. There is no reason one area
| should have a higher or lower GDP (GDR) than any other.
| And if they do, that is not a moral judgement on that
| region. It's just a fact. People seem to want to reduce
| everything to the lowest level to make it "fair", but
| regions are not people, regions should NOT be treated
| fairly. People should be treated fairly. Regions (and
| countries) are just made up...
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| You are completely right that this doesn't have a good
| outlook, but a self-fulfilling prophecy works in practice
| because of the societal friction.
|
| SK government had probably one last chance to reverse its
| course, when it tried to move the administrative capital to
| Sejong in 2003, but it was met with hard backlashes
| including a very creative constitutional decision. Keep in
| mind that Sejong is not very far from Seoul anyway, and yet
| it failed; Sejong does host many administrative facilities,
| but is short from being the capital in any sense.
| JCharante wrote:
| It's a nice self fulfilling prophecy. Smaller cities
| shouldn't exist. Imagine the internship opportunities
| available to high school students that kids can get in a
| big city vs small ones. My peers had tech companies in
| their hometowns whereas I didn't. Small cities put children
| in a disadvantage and should not exist. Big cities also
| have the scale to have specialized schools that match
| students with their interests while small cities just have
| a classroom for the whole grade.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| decentralization provides certain benefits at the cost of
| pure efficiency. People with your mindset are why our
| supply chains are still fucked up years after the Covid
| lockdowns. Maximizing efficiency kills durability and
| reliability
| bobthepanda wrote:
| When we are saying smaller cities in South Korea we are
| still talking about million plus cities. There are five
| of them not in Seoul's orbit.
|
| Germany famously lacks a dominant city and has a pretty
| good economy. So does the US. Decentralization is also
| diversification; if one region is falling behind it does
| not take the whole country with them.
| njarboe wrote:
| Big cities are way more expensive. People who live there
| have almost no kids. Rural and small cities have kept the
| US population from crashing completely. Big cities are
| currently dismantling their specialty high schools. I
| don't think the facts on the ground support that big
| cities are better for kids.
| kredd wrote:
| "People who live there have almost no kids" - that's just
| not true and super North America specific. Some personal
| data points - my entire family was born and raised in
| city of >3M population, everyone whom I know in Europe
| with kids live in fairly big cities.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The European big cities are much smaller than Seoul,
| which is 26M.
|
| Cities in this size range in East Asia all have massive
| fertility issues (Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing)
| raspberry1337 wrote:
| > Small cities put children in a disadvantage and should
| not exist
|
| This is the kind of radical bat shit craziness, from
| posters who are so intelligent they can rationalize
| anything, craziness that I love to find on HN.
|
| I went to high school in a specialized class in Sweden
| anyway and I didnt have any internship because if you
| study all your waking hours to get max grades you don't
| have time for interning.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Fwiw in a country with a big city much larger than any
| other city, the city is called a primate city. Seoul,
| London and Paris are all primate cities.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| The location will actually be Gyeonggi-do, south-east of Seoul.
| This area is close to the existing semiconductor regions of
| S.Korea, such as Pyeongtaek, Giheung, etc.
|
| So it's quite an organic decision to select such a location, as
| also all the suppliers and customers are already located in
| this region.
|
| Relocating to an entirely different region would just delay the
| process and actually risk to collapse the economy for quite
| mundane reasons.
|
| Other Industries have their center of weight located more
| south, like Automotive and Energy.
|
| One "mundane reason" to imagine the complexity:
|
| People now working in semiconductor sector all live around
| Seoul. Apartments in Korea are not rented but predominantly
| purchased on loan.
|
| Just announcing to pull a whole industry further away from
| Seoul would immediately drive up housing prices of the
| destination and collapse the housing prices in Seoul. So people
| selling to relocate could not pay off their loans with that
| money and could not acquire at the destination due to huge
| debt. Seoul real-estate market could collapse, and since most
| of it is owned on loan, it would at least immobilize the whole
| Seoul region (as people could not relocate without risking
| bancrupcy), at worst cause banks to no longer accept the
| apartments as sufficient security for the loan.
| kijin wrote:
| I think you're grossly exaggerating the real estate
| implications. There are 25 million people in the capital
| region, and only a small fraction of them work in the
| semiconductor industry. Relocating 200-300K people to a new
| industrial center might ease the pressure on housing a little
| bit, but there are millions more waiting to move in.
|
| Moreover, Seoulites really, seriously, desperately don't want
| to move out. The government has tried many times to create
| new cities away from Seoul with stable public-sector jobs;
| but a lot of people who work in Sejong, for example, just
| keep living in Seoul and make the 250km round trip every day.
| The 300K who actually moved to Sejong didn't make a dent in
| housing prices anywhere else, either.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| The distance between Gyeonggi-do, Korea and the DMZ is
| approximately 65 km (40 miles).
| pigsty wrote:
| > Just announcing to pull a whole industry further away from
| Seoul would immediately drive up housing prices of the
| destination and collapse the housing prices in Seoul.
|
| That's a win for the average person in Seoul. Housing prices
| are destroying this generation of young people.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Are housing prices in Seoul seeing the same inflation we
| see in many western cities? I'd be mildly surprised.
| (Anecdotally) It seems like Asian cultures are much less
| likely to treat housing as an investment and/or allow the
| few to dictate to the many (specifically in the housing
| arena).
| bgar wrote:
| >It seems like Asian cultures are much less likely to
| treat housing as an investment
|
| Isn't China one of the most prominent examples of using
| real estate as investment? There's even whole ghost towns
| of apartment buildings that are constructed for this
| purpose.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Isn't all that investment _outside_ of China? My
| understanding was ghost towns weren 't investment based
| but planning failure based
| bobthepanda wrote:
| No, domestic savers have capital controls and do not have
| the means to move money easily outside the country. The
| stock market also is not reliable in China as an avenue
| of investment. Government pensions are also small. So
| that mostly leaves real estate.
|
| Evergrande Group is emblematic of the real estate
| industry's trouble there. Property is 15-30% of Chinese
| GDP and much of it goes towards investment property.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Thanks!
| dmoy wrote:
| yea all my Chinese (in China) relatives assume you should
| _only_ invest in housing. And then when we tell them we
| have zero investment properties, they get really, really
| concerned for our future welfare and think that we 're
| not doing very well.
| mook wrote:
| Isn't Samsung pledging a bunch of money for this project?
| The Samsung with a finance arm...
|
| Tanking a bunch of their own investments doesn't sound like
| a great idea.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| [flagged]
| igravious wrote:
| "The concentration of so much crucial chip manufacturing in just
| two places has caused concerns over global supply chain stability
| especially as South Korea and Taiwan are both militarily
| threatened by neighbors, North Korea and China respectively."
|
| Always with the Western bias.
|
| If anything, given that there are U.S. troops in South Korea
| 10,000km and across an ocean from the U.S. mainland who is
| militarily threatening who? Long term Korea will be reunited, one
| hopes without conflict.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_conflict
|
| "The Korean conflict is an ongoing conflict based on the division
| of Korea between North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of
| Korea) and South Korea (Republic of Korea), _both of which claim
| to be the sole legitimate government of all of Korea_. During the
| Cold War, North Korea was backed by the Soviet Union, China, and
| other allies, while South Korea was backed by the United States,
| United Kingdom, and other Western allies.
|
| The division of Korea by the United States and the Soviet Union
| occurred in 1945. [...] The U.S. maintains a military presence in
| the South to assist South Korea in accordance with the ROK-U.S.
| Mutual Defense Treaty. In 1997, U.S. President Bill Clinton
| described the division of Korea as the "Cold War's last divide"."
|
| As for Taiwan the cornerstone of U.S.-China relations is the one-
| China policy, a policy which officially states that the China-
| Taiwan problem is an internal Chinese problem - whatever _you_
| think about the status of the tensions between the mainland and
| the island is irrelevant, I 'm talking about official U.S.
| foreign policy
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Communiqu%C3%A9
|
| "The United States formally acknowledged that "all Chinese on
| either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one
| China"."
|
| As such the U.S. is violating this policy by having troops
| stationed in Taiwan, by expanding that troop presence, and by the
| constant shuttling back-and-forth of high level politicians.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/07/nancy-pelosi...
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-to-expand-troop-presence-in...
|
| Both North Korea and China have recently warned the U.S. about
| this behavior of stoking tension far far from its border.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-us-military-drills-mi...
|
| https://apnews.com/article/china-congress-2023-qin-us-1938a7...
|
| ===
|
| My point is. Why does CNN insist on this throwaway paragraph when
| we all know that there are (at least) two sides to every conflict
| (if there weren't by definition we wouldn't have a conflict)? It
| is saddening that only the Western perspective is given. Why has
| mainstream establishment journalism in the West given up all
| pretenses to an unbiased neutral point of view?
|
| The same goes for HN. I know this is a U.S.-centric site but what
| people say on here regarding China and Russia is myopic and
| jingoistic most of the time, as are the articles linked to. All
| you have to do is search for the terms "Russia" and "China" and
| sort by recent date to be confronted with comment after comment
| and page after page of repulsive Western chauvinism. Like it or
| not these are nuclear superpowers and we have to share the planet
| with them. The sooner the United States government _and_ its
| people acknowledge this reality and step away from the constant
| brinkmanship and "national security" hypocrisy. The conflict in
| Ukraine is testament that the rest of the world has had enough of
| the West's arrogance.
| markles wrote:
| There is no violation of policy when both sides of the strait
| have differing views on what "one China" means. China can warn
| all it wants. It has been threatening Taiwan for decades.
| Frankly, Taiwan and the rest of Asia have had enough of China's
| arrogance.
| cholantesh wrote:
| It does if the US recognizes the PRC as the sole legal
| government of China. Which it does, along with most of the
| world.
| tjpnz wrote:
| I would add that recognition of the "One China" policy is
| just lip service for trade. Talk privately with any
| politician or leader of industry and they'll admit as much.
| Another way to view it is that it's merely acknowledgement of
| what China believes, the same strategy you might employ
| dealing with a petulant toddler.
|
| >Frankly, Taiwan and the rest of Asia have had enough of
| China's arrogance.
|
| Living in East Asia this is something I've observed when the
| subject comes up with locals. You're also going to hear
| similar if you watch the local news. It's certainly not an
| "anti-China" bias limited to the west.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| According to Money Today [1] the chip center is actually to be
| located in Yongin, Gyeonggi-do---about a hour away from the
| center of Seoul. Samsung is the primary investor to this center
| and will invest 300 trillion won (that's probably where $230B
| came frome) over next 20 years.
|
| [1] https://news.mt.co.kr/mtview.php?no=2023031511112875044
| bane wrote:
| For those who don't know much about SK, Yongin is a city of
| over a million that's right next to/south-east of Seoul --
| considered sort of the major suburb region. It's about as large
| as Seoul area-wise, but is one of the fastest growing urban
| areas in the country. Thus it has generally better
| infrastructure planning, roads, newer buildings, slightly more
| affordable housing, etc. making it very desirable as a location
| for families to live in with not terrible commutes into Seoul
| if needed (about an hour).
|
| Seoul, while an amazing and dynamic city, can be a bit of an
| urban snarl. The layers of urban development, especially the
| post-war decades can be a bit dodgy, expensive and not all that
| great to raise a family in.
|
| Living-in, or commuting to Yongin is far more desirable than
| Seoul at the moment.
| Idiot_in_Vain wrote:
| That's a good thing - Yongin is to the south of Seoul, quite
| far away from the border with North Korea. Out of range of most
| North Korean artillery.
| bilekas wrote:
| What a strange comment.
|
| Honestly, if this is what you're worried about those few
| miles/km's wont matter.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| It may matter tremendously if SHTF, as a difference between
| few missiles that get trough Patriot defenses hitting some
| random part of fab vs fab looking like Mariupol steel plant
| or Bakhmut. russian war in Ukraine gives us some very good
| lessons is east vs west current warfare, if you care to
| look for them
| KineticLensman wrote:
| They can hardly continue chip production as if nothing
| had happened if NK is shelling towns 50km to the North.
| avisser wrote:
| I don't think "production during the war" is the point. I
| believe the point GP is making is that production can
| continue after hostilities cease if and only if the plant
| is intact.
|
| Being beyond the range of 155mm artillery makes that much
| more likely.
| pookha wrote:
| North Korea's not a threat to anything except rogue ROK
| fishermen. They can hardly get fuel into the country. The
| citizens have to result to eating tree bark. When one of
| their soldiers fled to the south he had ten different
| intestinal parasites...Their entire existence is a charade
| and it's being milked to sell weapons. Shit is inhumane. And
| I've been to Seoul dozens of times. A lot of the locals are
| afraid of reunification because it might tank their condo
| values (or at least that's what I was told).
| pphysch wrote:
| How does going to Seoul tell you anything about the facts-
| on-the-ground in a neighboring country? Seems like a non
| sequitor.
| pookha wrote:
| I was saying that because -- in my humble opinion -- the
| ongoing farce with North Korea is as much on the ROK as
| it is with the US...There's a significant segmentation of
| South Korean's that are just as unlikely to push for re-
| unification as the US. They're glad to play the game with
| the Pentagon if that means their bottom line isn't hurt.
| Which is wild. There's a huge portion of Korea that's
| been locked into hell for sixty+ years. Enough with the
| bullshit.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Artillery launched by a sickly army can still do plenty of
| damage on an urban center. And definitely on a high tech
| manufacturing facility.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| But not out of range of longer range rocket or missile arty,
| nor aircraft or saboteurs.
|
| Why can't we build fabs in countries that aren't at risk of
| fuckery by the CCP?
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| > Why can't we build fabs in countries that aren't at risk
| of fuckery by the CCP?
|
| Because they have ICBMs and we don't have countries outside
| of Earth yet.
| sct202 wrote:
| Because 'we' are not building the fabs, these people are
| building fabs in their own countries wherever they want to
| put them.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Sure, but not their conventional missiles. That your high
| value targets are outside of range of the opponents very
| cheapest weapon systems seems like a very mild benefit.
| ashwagary wrote:
| I always found it interesting that 99% of all high value SK
| targets are less than 50 miles from the North Korean
| border.
|
| A chip factory located further away, though a good idea,
| will hardly put a dent in the earlier observation.
| farseer wrote:
| Easily within range of bigger rocket artillery. The security
| point prolly wasn't considered when selecting this location
| otherwise they would have build it somewhere on their
| southern coast. Of-course most of the engineering talent is
| near Seoul, so that leaves them with no choice.
| neom wrote:
| Much better article (in English):
| https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/tech/2023/03/419_347185.htm...
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