Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced plans to expand its NAND flash production capacity in Pyeongtaek, Korea, reinforcing the company’s ability to meet demands from emerging technologies. Construction, which began this May, will pave the way for mass production of Samsung’s cutting-edge V-NAND memory in the second half of 2021.

“The new investment reaffirms our commitment to sustain undisputed leadership in memory technologies, even in uncertain times,” said Cheol Choi, executive vice president of Memory Global Sales & Marketing at Samsung Electronics. “We will continue to serve the market with the most optimized solutions available, while contributing to growth of the overall IT industry and the economy in general.”

In the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution fueled by artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and 5G expansion, the added capacity will play a major role in helping to address mid- to long-term demands for NAND flash memory. As digital lifestyles become more prevalent, Samsung will continue to be proactive in making new investments in order to seize future market opportunities.

Samsung’s NAND flash production network extends from Hwaseong and Pyeongtaek in Korea to Xi’an, China. Established in 2015, Samsung’s Pyeongtaek Campus is a hub for next-generation memory technologies, consisting of two of the world’s largest-scale production lines.

Leveraging its significant edge in manufacturing and technology, Samsung has held the leadership position in NAND flash memory for the past 18 years, with one recent innovation being the industry-first sixth-generation (1xx-layer) V-NAND introduced last July. Through balanced investment across its global sites, Samsung aims to maintain a robust production network that will further cement its market leadership.

Reference: Samsung V-NAND Mass Production Timeline

This year, WCG returned to the international stage after a six-year hiatus, making it a highly anticipated event for e-sports fans all around the world. Qualification matches have been held online by region all over the world since March, and those who advanced were invited to the WCG 2019 Grand Final, hosted from July 18-21 in Xian, China.

On top of its official sponsorship of WCG 2019, Samsung operated a 595 square meter Samsung Exhibition at the event for visitors to explore.

The 2019 World Cyber Games captivates audiences in Xian, China

Samsung Electronics SSD will also be participating in the games show China Joy in August, as well as the Tokyo Game Show this September, two games shows that make up half of the top four global game industry events. At these two events, Samsung Electronics SSD will also set up exhibition booths for visitors to enjoy a series of events, video streams and pro-gamer competition matches.

Samsung is pursuing these partnerships with global gaming shows due to the suitability of their Solid State Drives (SSDs) for the gaming industry. Take a look at the video below, produced by Samsung to showcase the industry-leading performance and speed of its SSDs, to see main character Bike overcome competitors and other obstacles by collecting Samsung SSD products.

Compared to traditional HDDs, Samsung’s SATA SSDs boost performance by up to 4 times, extract files 3 times faster and copy photos 10 times faster. For instance, it takes only 31 seconds for SDDs to extract a 4.7GB movie, while this same process takes over 3 times as long – 96 seconds – using HDDs. Accordingly, users playing high-spec games are increasingly adopting SSDs. Samsung’s V-NAND flash-based SSD (860 PRO/EVO/QVO) provides players with a fully immersive game-playing environment thanks to the overall boost it gives to PC performance. The benefits to this SSD include high-speed game loading times, low latency and seamless in-game responsiveness, even when multitasking.

The Samsung 970 EVO Plus is an SSD designed for games that support 4K or Direct X12, which call on PCs to handle the download of large files along with increased disk input/output operations. The Samsung NVMe SSD 970 EVO Plus can significantly increase the speed of such demanding games; according to Samsung’s internal test results, game loading is reduced between 7 to 37% when using an NWMe SSD compared to SATA drives.

The Samsung Portable SSD T5 can be applied to a gaming console, offering not only a fast loading speed but also the increase of a console’s storage space up to 2TB. Samsung internal testing showed that when using the Portable SSD T5, users enjoyed a significantly faster game loading speed compared to when using an external HDD.

(From left to right) 860EVO, 970 EVO Plus, Potable SSD T5