Industrial gas major Linde will build a new air separation unit to expand gas supply to Samsung’s sprawling chip complex in Pyeongtaek, South Korea.
The ASU will be the eighth on-site ASU to supply nitrogen, oxygen, and argon to the facility from its start-up in mid-2026. Linde will also supply Samsung with hydrogen from its existing on-site hydrogen production facilities.
“Pyeongtaek is Linde’s single largest site for an electronics customer worldwide,” said BS Sung, President of Linde Korea.
Samsung’s Pyeongtaek complex is one of the largest semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the world, producing advanced DRAM, NAND flash memory, and logic chips.
The company continues to expand production at the site with multi-billion-dollar investments to meet growing demand for semiconductors used in artificial intelligence, data centres and electronics.
Samsung said in 2020 it would invest over $100bn by 2030 in advanced chip manufacturing, with a large portion aimed at expanding Pyeongtaek and new fabs nearby.
To support this expanding production, the Pyeongtaek site requires vast quantities of ultra-high-purity gases. A single semiconductor fabrication line can consume up to 50,000 Nm³ of nitrogen per hour for purging, inerting, and cleaning processes. Hydrogen, oxygen, and argon are also needed for deposition, etching and oxidation stages of chip production.
