Samsung pours money into chip making plants

Samsung says it will sink $1.9 billion dollars to increase DRAM memory production in its factories in South Korea. The company will upgrade 14 existing plants in addition to building a 15th factory. Samsung believes DRAM demand will increase by more than 75 percent and hopes to increase DRAM shipments by 30% versus last year.

The increase in demand comes from the ever-increasing amount of memory in typical desktop boxes. Samsung believes that computers will have an average of 1.34 GB of RAM in the fourth quarter of 2007, an almost 33% increase from the early 2007 estimate of 1.03 GB per machine. Microsoft’s Vista increased memory requirements will no doubt fuel most of this bloat.