Samsung Electronics seems to have made higher investments than Intel and TSMC into semiconductor facilities this year.

Market research company IC Insights estimates that the amount of Samsung Electronics' investments into semiconductor facilities this year will be around $26 billion. This amount is more than double than the company's investments last year ($11.3 billion).
Samsung announced that it will be investing $26.6 billion (29.5 trillion KRW) this year just for its semiconductor business. IC Insights is estimating that total amount of facility investments made by global semiconductor industries this year will be around $90.8 billion, which is a 35% increase compared to the amount of last year's investments. This indicates that amount of Samsung Electronics' investments corresponds to whopping 28.6% of total amount of facility investments made by global semiconductor industries.

IC Insights analyzed that Samsung will be investing $14 billion into 3D NAND flash memories, $7 billion into DRAMs, and $5 billion into foundries and others this year. The research firm is predicting that Samsung will use its investment for 3D NAND flash memory will be used to increase the production capacity of its new facility in Pyeongtaek. It is also predicting that Samsung's
investments for DRAM and foundry will be used to upgrade process nodes and supplement loss from wafer inputs (increase in number of processes) and to increase production of 10-nano semiconductors respectively.

"This large-scale investment made by Samsung Electronics will cause oversupply of 3D NAND flash memories." said IC Insights. "This will incite investments from other competitors such as SK Hynix, Toshiba, Micron, and Intel."

IC Insights believes that Samsung's large-scale investment will stifle hopes of Chinese businesses looking to enter NAND flash memory or DRAM markets.