Exclusive: Made in Texas: Apple's A5 iPhone chip

[haikuman]

http://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-made-tex...-050557501.
By Poornima Gupta | Reuters – 17 hrs ago

SAN FRANCISCO - Apple Inc is famous for relying on low-cost Asian manufacturers to both source and assemble its popular gadgets, but the consumer device giant recently started receiving a critical component in its iPad and iPhones from closer to home - Texas.

The A5 processor - the brain in the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 - is now made in a sprawling 1.6 million square feet factory in Austin owned by Korean electronics giant Samsung Electronics, according to people familiar with the operation.

One of the few major components to be sourced from within the United States, the A5 processor is built by Samsung in a newly constructed $3.6 billion non-memory chip production line that reached full production in early December.

Nearly all of the output of the non-memory chip production from the factory - which is the size of about nine football fields - is dedicated to producing Apple chips, one of the people said. Samsung also produces NAND flash memory chips in Austin.

The South Korean giant began supplying the A5 processors to Apple this year from the Austin plant, the people said.

[sekker]

Good news for Austin for sure.

I hope that means they pay corporate taxes i the US.

The reason they had the money to build the plant is because we sent so much $$ to Korea in the past.

Smart politics by Samsung , too

[deckeda]

Since you mentioned Tejas, for a minute there I thought the A5 was TI's chip.

I hope that means they pay corporate taxes in the US.

That would be nice. I also wonder if Samsung got a sweetheart deal to build there, like many car makers do when they build factories in America.

[Will Collier]

[DRR]

Just down the street from me.