Samsung affiliates plan to invest a combined 12.26 trillion won ($9.15 billion) in chip operations, and nearly 8 trillion won of that is heading to Vietnam. The largest piece is a memory chip testing project from Samsung Electronics in Yen Binh Industrial Park, Thai Nguyen, in the north of the country, while high-end work stays in South Korea.
Samsung Electronics has submitted a plan to local authorities to spend 105.79 trillion Vietnamese dong ($4.09 billion) on the testing site. The first line is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2027 and a second for 2028. The Vietnamese plants will not make wafers; they will run final tests on DRAM and NAND flash chips packaged at Samsung’s Cheonan plant. Around 63 per cent of the cost, or 66.64 trillion dong, is to come from profits reinvested by Samsung’s Vietnamese operations, so the pace depends partly on future earnings there.
Samsung has not said how testing volumes will be divided. Joo Seung-hwan, a professor at Inha University’s Graduate School of Manufacturing Innovation, expects high-bandwidth memory to stay in Cheonan and Onyang while conventional memory moves to Vietnam. According to industry sources, 103 Vietnamese engineers have already trained at Cheonan and Onyang in memory testing and equipment operation. Samsung has made smartphones in Thai Nguyen since 2013.
Samsung Electro-Mechanics announced on 29 September that it will invest 6.78 trillion won in flip-chip ball grid array substrate capacity, with 4.27 trillion won going to Sejong and 2.51 trillion won to Vietnam. These substrates connect high-performance processors to circuit boards, and demand is rising as AI servers need larger and more complex packages. Sejong is due to start mass production in September 2028 and will focus on the most demanding products, while the Vietnamese expansion, aimed at global orders, is targeted for completion by June 2030. Government funding and long-term purchase commitments from customers reduce the upfront risk.
Spreading production across borders gives Samsung more room to cope if Korean operations are disrupted, though shipping chips to Vietnam for testing adds logistics costs and demands tighter coordination. It is also unclear whether the new lines will add to Korean output or take over work now done at home. One industry source said Vietnam’s role could stay narrow without local suppliers of materials and equipment. “Expanding production facilities overseas and building a local semiconductor ecosystem are two different things,” the source said.
