Highlights:

  • In Japan’s Kagoshima prefecture, Kyocera will build a new semiconductor package plant as part of a USD 9.8 billion investment.
  • For the debt financing, the company is likely to use its 15% stake in KDDI Corp., which is Japan’s second largest telecommunications company, as collateral.

Kyocera Corp. of Japan will spend 1.3 trillion Yen, or USD 9.78 billion, between now and March 2026 to build new chip component plants and grow in other ways.

Recently, Nikkei Asia shared the plan. Kyocera plans to spend USD 9.78 billion over the next three years on capital expenditures like building new plants and paying for research and development. According to the report, the planned investment is about twice as much as Kyocera spent on the same things in the previous three years.

Kyocera, based in Kyoto, makes many different things, from printers to solar panels. It is also a major maker of parts for chips. The company sells parts for processors in vehicles, networking devices in data centres, and a wide range of other systems.

A semiconductor package is a special case that holds chips like central processing units. The chip inside the semiconductor package is safe from potential damages that could hurt it. It also helps eliminate heat and provides wires for connecting to other electronic parts.

In Japan’s Kagoshima prefecture, Kyocera will build a new semiconductor package plant as part of the USD 9.8 billion investment. The plant will likely cost about 60 billion yen, or USD 450 million, to build.

The company will also build a new manufacturing factory in Nagasaki. This factory will be used to make “ceramic components and semiconductor packaging,” according to reports. Ceramics are used to make a lot of the packages that hold semiconductors. It is said that building the plant will cost up to 100 billion yen, or USD 749 billion and is expected to start production in 2026.

Nikkei Asia says that Kyocera also wants to expand several plants that already make multifunctional printers and components of quartz. It produces large quantities of crystal oscillators, a type of circuit often made of quartz, which helps control the clock speed of processors.

Kyocera may borrow up to 1 trillion Yen to pay for the investment it wants to make. For debt financing, the company will likely use its 15% stake in KDDI Corp., Japan’s second-largest telecommunications company, as a collateral. It might start borrowing money before March 2023 to get up to 500 billion Yen over the next three years.

Over the next few years, Intel Corp. will likely put more money into chip package technologies. Sources told Reuters in August that the company plans to spend at least five billion dollars on a new chip packaging and assembly facility in Italy. It is said to have chosen the town of Vigasio, about 68 miles west of Venice, as the best site for the facility.

Foveros is a new way to package semiconductors that will be used in a few of Intel’s upcoming processors. With this technology, it is possible to stack several chip modules, also called “chiplets,” in a three-dimensional configuration. Intel’s Xeon GPU Max artificial intelligence processor, which has 47 chiplets with 100 billion transistors, will be one of the first products to use Foveros.