Samsung Commits $1.5bn to Vietnam Chip-Testing Plant, With $2.5bn More on the Table
Samsung Electronics will invest 39 trillion dong, or about $1.5bn, in a semiconductor testing plant in Vietnam, according to a document seen by Reuters on Wednesday.
Construction has already begun in an industrial park 60 kilometres north of Hanoi, with operations scheduled to start in November 2027.
The plant will be Samsung’s first dedicated chip-testing facility in Vietnam.
The numbers attached to the project are impressive:
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It is sized to deliver 153.3 billion gigabits a year of DRAM and a further 255.6 billion gigabits of NAND.
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Samsung has also indicated its intent to reinvest profits from the project, “if any,” up to a further $2.5bn for a potential second facility, bringing the total committed and contingent footprint to roughly $4bn.
Testing is a crucial step in chip production:
- It verifies every memory die produced upstream.
- It bins them by performance and prepares them for packaging.
Capacity in this part of the chain has been a bottleneck through 2025 and 2026 as demand for AI-grade memory far exceeded available test infrastructure. Samsung’s Vietnam plant directly addresses this constraint without requiring the higher capital expenditure of a new wafer fab.
The site selection also carries geopolitical significance.
- Vietnam has actively solicited chip-supply-chain investment as part of its strategy to position itself as a Southeast Asian semiconductor hub.
- Samsung is already the largest single foreign investor in Vietnam, with cumulative commitments exceeding $23bn. The new plant deepens that footprint at a critical moment as US tariff policy begins shifting chip supply chains away from mainland China.
The timing also coincides with internal challenges for Samsung. A labour dispute involving the memory division’s bonus structure has been ongoing, and this announcement serves as a quieter signal that their chip-side investment plans remain intact despite domestic turmoil.
Vietnam is emerging as a central node in the global chip supply diversification story, with facilities already operational or expanding from TSMC, Intel, Amkor, and now Samsung.