Semiconductor History | Pyeongtaek Campus, 20 May 2022 — A President's First Stop in Asia Was Somebody Else's Fab

Air Force One landed at Osan Air Base in the late afternoon, and within the hour the president of the United States was at the gate of a private company's factory a few kilometres up the road. Yoon Suk-yeol met him there. It was Yoon's eleventh day in office and Biden's first stop in Asia. Lee Jae-yong walked the two of them along the line for about half an hour while an executive vice-president, Suh Byung-hoon, explained what the machines were doing. The presidents signed a wafer. Korean coverage that weekend made the point that no American president had been inside a Samsung chip plant before. The purpose was stated openly rather than implied. The White House called the Pyeongtaek campus a model for the plant Samsung was building in Taylor, Texas — a 17 billion dollar project it said would bring 3,000 jobs. That is an unusual role for a factory. What was being exported was not chips but the plant itself: the layout, the schedule, and the people who knew how to run one. The campus was also less finished than the evening implied. It was still drawing power at 154 kilovolts that night, and the dedicated 345-kilovolt line Samsung had paid for was not commissioned until September 2023. Nor did Texas arrive on time. Ground was broken at Taylor later in 2022, the second-half-of-2024 opening quoted that week passed without production, and Samsung pushed the start into 2026. The photograph is the reason this memory exists at all. Samsung's fabs are closed sites and almost nothing of their interiors is free to publish, but a United States government photographer worked that tour, so the frame belongs to nobody. It shows an aisle of the line: overhead transport rails, technicians in coveralls at the far end, a wall of tool bays on the right, and two heads of state standing in a corridor most people will never see. Photo: Cameron Smith, Official White House Photo, United States Government Work, via Flickr.