> According to a media report, the equipment move-in will be completed by early July and the first phase of the fab will be able to start volume production of DRAM in the third quarter.<p>Ouch, that's an aggressive schedule. Two months to qualify the equipment and the process, train technicians, establish PM schedules, ramp up testing and QA departments, and run pilot lots? If anything at all goes wrong -- one bad mask, one misaligned robot that scratches all the wafers, one misconfigured test program -- you lose three weeks and have to start over. More if you have to revise a mask. Even more if you don't discover the problem until after burn-in. If they hit volume production in the third quarter, it's going to be at the very end of September, and it's going to be a very generous definition of "volume."
When the $ spent on importing chips is more than the amount spent on importing oil, you know full well that that there is no real alternative but to invest heavily into the semiconductor industry. In 2016, $227 billion worth of chips were imported by China [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-chips/chips-down-china-aims-to-boost-semiconductors-as-trade-war-looms-idUSKBN1HR1DF" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-chips/chi...</a>
I have a dissenting opinion.<p>Rather than getting two more fabs, Chinese state funds have just launched two more barely working ones that add to a long long list of their failed attempts to achieve self sufficiency in memory supply.<p>There were numerous attempts by Xinhua University Group in the past to launch memory businesses. Judging by that those fabs stand dark for years, none of them succeeded, and a lot of taxpayers money just got wasted again.