The U.S. government announced a plan Monday to award Samsung Electronics Co. up to US$6.4 billion in grants to support the South Korean tech giant's chipmaking investment in central Texas, as it strives to strengthen domestic semiconductor production. The Commerce Department said it has reached a nonbinding preliminary agreement with Samsung to provide the grants under the CHIPS and Science Act to back the company's expected investment of more than $40 billion, in the establishment of a "leading-edge semiconductor ecosystem" in the state. The proposed investment would be split across multiple projects at two separate locations in Texas, including the construction of an advanced manufacturing cluster in Taylor and the expansion of the existing facilities in Austin. President Joe Biden touted Samsung's investment in light of the decadesold alliance between South Korea and the United States. "Today's announcement of Samsung's investment in the United States is another example of how my Investing in America agenda and the U.S.-ROK alliance is creating opportunity in every corner of the country," he said in a statement. ROK stands for South Korea's official name, the Republic of Korea. He reiterated that the 2022 CHIPS Act is designed to restore U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing and help maintain access to chips. "Well before the law was passed, I was working to address our supply chain vulnerabilities," he said. "This included my trip to the Republic of Korea, where I visited Samsung's Pyeongtaek campus to see one of the largest semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the world." Samsung's proposed investment in Taylor would construct a comprehensive advanced manufacturing cluster, including two leading-edge logic foundry fabs focused on mass production of 4 nanometer (nm) and 2 nm process technologies, a research and development fab dedicated to technology generations ahead of nodes currently in production, and an advanced packaging facility. Its investment in Austin is dedicated to expanding the existing facilities to support the production of leading fully depleted silicon-on-insulator process technologies for U.S. industries, including aerospace, defense and automotive, according to the department. The act sets aside $39 billion in incentives to encourage chipmakers to build, expand or modernize semiconductor facilities in the U.S. The Commerce Department plans to invest about $28 billion of the total in leading-edge chipmakers, like Samsung. The much-anticipated announcement came after TSMC Arizona Corporation, Intel Corp., GlobalFoundries, the American subsidiary of BAE Systems Plc and Microchip Technology Inc. were selected as beneficiaries. Investments by Samsung and other firms put the U.S. on track to deliver on its plan to produce about 20 percent of the world's leading-edge logic chips by 2030, the department said. Source: Yonhap News Agency