Samsung’s $17 billion fab campus in Taylor, Texas is the largest single foreign-direct-investment construction project in Texas history, and it’s now inside the last calendar quarter of vertical work. The site spans 1,200 acres on the eastern edge of Taylor, about 35 miles northeast of Austin, with a footprint sized for two leading-edge logic fabs and clean-room utility scope big enough to anchor a small power district.

Project Scope

The first fab, Fab 1, is targeting 50,000 wafer starts per month at the 2nm node, with risk production scheduled for the second half of 2026 and high-volume manufacturing ramping into 2027. The clean-room shell totals roughly 6 million square feet across the campus, with Fab 1 alone occupying close to half that. Samsung is using its own Austin Semiconductor team as the construction manager, self-performing site-wide coordination and managing more than 100 specialty trade subcontractors at peak.

ASML’s EUV lithography systems landed earlier this year and first-light commissioning is the next milestone. The campus also includes a central utility plant sized for industrial chemical, gas, and water handling at the scale required for sub-3nm node manufacturing, and the regional water authority has executed an effluent-reuse agreement that allows the site to recover process water at industry-leading rates.

Why It Matters

The Taylor fab is the visible end of the CHIPS Act money. Samsung’s $4.7 billion in federal CHIPS funding, finalized in 2024, is anchored against capacity buildout at this site. Tesla and Apple are reported customers for first-run silicon, putting Texas at the center of two of the largest non-Asian semiconductor supply chains. Exchange covered the related TSMC Arizona Fab 21 buildout earlier this week.

For construction, the project is also a labor case study. Samsung has run with roughly 12,000 trade workers on site during peak, with a particularly heavy lift on instrumentation, clean-room steel, and high-purity gas piping. Most of that crew came in from outside Williamson County, and the labor market spillover into Round Rock and Hutto has been one of the more visible side effects of the build. By end of 2026, Samsung Austin Semiconductor expects to have moved roughly 1,000 staff into the office building on site, with another 1,500 permanent fab roles filling in through 2027.

The campus is sized for a second fab, Fab 2, with site work already complete on the Phase 2 pad. Samsung has been public about staging the Fab 2 build to demand, and at this point the question isn’t whether the second fab gets built. It’s when.

Project Team & Details