Kyocera announces $9.78 billion investment plan to construct new semiconductor manufacturing plants.
Japan's Kyocera Corp. will invest 1.3 trillion yen, or $9.78 billion, through March 2026 to build new chip component plants and expand its capabilities in other areas, according to Nikkei Asia. The $9.78 billion that Kyocera intends to spend over the next three years includes capital expenditures such as plant construction, as well as research and development costs. The planned investment approximately doubles what Kyocera spent on the same items during the previous three years.
Kyoto-based Kyocera makes a wide range of products ranging from printers to solar panels and is a major manufacturer of chip components. The company supplies components for vehicle processors, data center networking devices and a range of other systems. Semiconductor packages shield chips from potential sources of damage, help dissipate heat, and provide wires for connecting to other electronic components.
As part of its planned $9.8 billion investment, Kyocera will build a new semiconductor package plant in Japan's Kagoshima prefecture at a construction cost of about 60 billion yen, or $450 million. The company will also build a new manufacturing facility in Nagasaki that will reportedly focus on making "ceramic components and semiconductor packaging," with a projected cost of up to 100 billion yen, or $749 billion, expected to begin production in 2026. Kyocera also plans to expand a number of existing plants that make multifunctional printers and quartz components, as it is a major producer of crystal oscillators, a type of circuit often made from quartz that helps regulate processors' clock speed.
Kyocera reportedly plans to fund its planned investment by borrowing up to 1 trillion yen, using its 15% stake in KDDI Corp., Japan's second largest telecommunications company, as collateral for the debt financing. The company is expected to begin borrowing before March 2023 with the goal of raising up to 500 billion yen over the following three years.
Intel Corp. is also expected to increase its investment in chip package technologies over the next few years. In August, sources told Reuters that the company plans to spend at least $5 billion on a new chip packaging and assembly facility in Italy, with Vigasio, a town located about 68 miles west of Venice, selected as the preferred site. Several of Intel's upcoming processors will include a new semiconductor package technology called Foveros, which makes it possible to stack multiple chip modules, or chiplets, atop one another in a three-dimensional configuration. One of the first Intel products to feature Foveros will be its Xeon GPU Max artificial intelligence processor, which features 47 chiplets with 100 billion transistors.