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The story
Semiconductor giant Kioxia has announced it will build a new “Third Fabrication Building” at its plant in Kitakami, Iwate Prefecture, in response to surging AI-driven demand. The investment totals roughly ¥1.8 trillion, marking an expansion following the Second Fabrication Building that came online in September 2025, with operations targeted to begin sometime in fiscal 2029. On 5ch’s News Flash+ board, opinions were split: some worried this could be “a repeat of Elpida,” the memory maker that collapsed in 2012, while others argued AI demand will keep growing for years to come — and still others warned of the risk that supply and demand could flip into oversupply.
Semiconductor giant Kioxia revealed it will build a new “Third Fabrication Building” at its plant in Kitakami, Iwate Prefecture, to meet growing demand driven by the spread of AI. The company says it will invest ¥1.8 trillion.
Kioxia Holdings President Hiroo Ota met with Prime Minister Takaichi on August 27 and revealed the plan to build a new Third Fabrication Building at the company’s plant in Kitakami.
It will be built south of the Second Fabrication Building, which came online in September 2025. The investment is expected to total about ¥1.8 trillion, with operations targeted to start sometime during fiscal 2029.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Re: #10
That's the thing — you don't build for what's short right now, you build for what'll be short years from now.
Elpida just never managed to pull that off.
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If we're unlucky, the AI bubble might already be over by the time it's finished.
The reason memory prices are spiking right now is that makers shut down their memory lines and switched to more profitable products.
They already know making memory chips from here on out won't pay off.
What's supposedly more profitable than memory, exactly?
Do you even know what Kioxia makes versus what Samsung makes?
You don't even know what memory chips are, and you're saying this?
Tohoku's economy has been looking pretty good lately.
Wages there aren't all that different from elsewhere, though.
Aichi's genuinely higher, but that's about it.
[Population decline rate, 2020-2025]
1st: Akita Prefecture — 8.40%
2nd: Aomori Prefecture — 7.49%
3rd: Iwate Prefecture — 6.92%
4th: Yamagata Prefecture — 6.89%
5th: Kochi Prefecture — 6.75%
6th: Fukushima Prefecture — 6.30%
That list is basically all Tohoku — something needs to be done about it.
The Tohoku prefecture actually doing best economically is Aomori.
At this rate there's a good chance of a memory oversupply and a price crash.
Great news if you're a consumer, but for shareholders… not so much.
Yikes, that's rough.
You should go straight to Kioxia and SanDisk and give them some advice —
'You idiots! Spend trillions expanding production and it'll crash right away!'
Then head to America and advise NVIDIA too —
'Memory's about to crash! Anyone buying it now is a fool!!'
I bet they'd weep with gratitude: 'Thank you, you're a prophet!'
Consumer-grade NAND and data-center-grade NAND aren't the same thing, though.
They're basically the same.
Domestic memory production does need to be nurtured.
This expansion is basically a national policy project at this point.
Well, demand's hard to call, but
TrendForce's forecast puts the turning point next year.
Apparently a specific technical factor is going to reshape the supply-demand balance.
They're saying it could tip into oversupply by the end of next year.
From 1985 through the early '90s, they used to call memory chips "the rice of industry" (a metaphor casting DRAM as an indispensable industrial staple, like rice is Japan's staple food), and Japan held an 80% global share.
And yet Japan just walked away from DRAM production so easily.
They should've kept at least one player alive as a matter of national policy.
47,900 -4,600
-8.76%
8/28
Every time it ticks up, the short-sellers dump it all at once.
Nobody's going to buy at this rate.
Felt like yesterday Kioxia and the whole semiconductor sector were the only ones getting crushed.
They're cranking out factories left and right now.
If they do nothing now, they'll lose to China completely.
They're trying to build it, but nothing's actually up yet.
Good odds it stays limit-up for several days straight.
Not happening at these interest rates.
On the weekday NMS broadcast she comes across kind of low-energy.
it'd be in a position now where it didn't have to kowtow to either China or Korea.
Japan got stuck clinging to stolen technology and never developed the mindset to cut process steps and drive down costs.
Japan had no cost-cutting know-how, and ended up getting thoroughly beaten even by Micron in the US — despite Micron's higher labor costs.
There's no real technological edge there.
They don't need factory hands.
No, that's exactly my point — can they secure high-skilled talent or not?
What AI needs is performance, not storage.
Background and Key Points of This Story
This investment announcement came right after a meeting with Prime Minister Takaichi, aligning with the government’s push to boost semiconductor production for economic security reasons. The central question is whether demand can be sustained — some market research firms have pegged the memory supply-demand turning point at around late 2026, a figure that came up in the thread as well. There was also discussion of Japan’s semiconductor history, including its retreat from DRAM after holding the bulk of the global market in the 1980s, though claims about technology leaks remain disputed even among industry insiders and shouldn’t be read as settled fact. As for securing high-skilled talent around Kitakami, the plant itself has a solid operating track record, but the scarcity of universities and other educational institutions in the area does read as a genuine ongoing challenge based on the source material.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (News Flash+) thread “Kioxia to Invest ¥1.8 Trillion in Memory Production Expansion — New Plant Planned in Kitakami, Iwate.”
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