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.
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.
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.
That’s a win for the average person in Seoul. Housing prices are destroying this generation of young people.
Tanking a bunch of their own investments doesn't sound like a great idea.
It's just that leaving Seoul is not worth it for anyone involved.
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.
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.
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.
Bigger cities are just more efficient and effective.
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.
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...
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.
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!
They want workers and they want Seoul. Workers want Seoul and they don't want to rely on their employers. This is always going to continue the fueling of Seoul border growth.
The country has been overconcentrated in Seoul since at least the beginning of the dictatorship. Breaking the cycle will not happen overnight, and you don’t even need to build new cities, just invest in the other ones. (Sejong was probably a bad idea.)
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.
Because Seoul is so big, it's more akin to calling Yongin a "suburb" of Seoul, and Yongin has its own suburbs.
Seoul and Yongin compared area wise would be the worst since you have to first set the definition of Seoul. Seoul covers Yongin in most natural definitions of a city, but in reality the Seoul inner region is its own and is obviously tiny. It's better to call it Seoul metro area (Seoul Capital Area).
Yongin is an old city, it doesn't have better infrastructure planning at all, but it doesn't have a lot of super old infrastructure which is great for future planning. Be it due to budget or just slow crawl of improvement, who knows. It's desirable because it has everything you need, now including Costco, IKEA, etc. and it's got land. That's all.
Your last answer is weird. There's nothing better about Yongin than living in Seoul, except for possibly commutes. It's all a matter of perspective and negatives. I don't think either are objectively better but living in Seoul is definitely more sought after and "higher" status.
Honestly, if this is what you're worried about those few miles/km's wont matter.
Yeah. It doesn't matter at all.
A chip factory located further away, though a good idea, will hardly put a dent in the earlier observation.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
That small price delta will be nothing if that happens.
also in the new and upcoming space age that is budding, quality assurance is a number one concern.
And sorry for being political, I guess there are many big brain reasons for this (unironically), but it's funny
This plant isn't being located in Seoul, despite what the stupid headline says.
Anyway, NK has no trouble launching ballistic missiles over Japan at this point, so I'm not sure a few hundred km really makes a big difference.
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...
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.
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...
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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.
>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.
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).
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 ?
even if all the fabs are actually built to completion, all you get is the value of ICs plummeting
