In a rather unexpected move, Samsung will reportedly open a chip development facility in Yokohama, Japan. According to the Nikkei, Samsung is readying a 30 billion yen or US$222 million investment near its current R&D institute in Japan. Samsung is hoping to be able to leverage a combination of Japanese and Korean expertise at the site, although exactly what kind of chip development that will take place at the site is currently unknown, beyond it being focused on the back-end processor of chip manufacturing. This generally involves the wafer packaging process or chip stacking, processes that have evolved a lot of the past few years.

The facility is said to be employing hundreds of people once it starts operating sometime in 2025. The Nikkei is also reporting that Samsung is hoping to take advantage of subsidies offered by the Japanese government, which might also be one of the reasons for opening the development unit in Japan. The subsidies are said to be in excess of 10 billion yen. Considering that Japan and Korea aren't on the best terms at the moment, for many reasons and most of them irrelevant to this news post, it's surprising to see Samsung making this move, as although it might be a fairly minor investment for the company, it's doing so on what could only be referred to as hostile soil.