Kioxia Plans New NAND Factory in Iwate, Japan, with Investment Exceeding 1 Trillion Yen
Nashnova编辑部
Kioxia will build a third NAND flash facility at its Iwate site, investing over ¥1 trillion (~$6.27 billion) jointly with SanDisk, targeting operations in 2029 or later — a major expansion of Japan's domestic memory-chip capacity.
What is Kioxia building, and at what cost?
The new plant will be the third production building at Kioxia's existing Iwate campus, dedicated to mass-producing NAND flash — a type of storage chip that retains data without power, used in phones and data centers.
Total investment exceeds ¥1 trillion (~$6.27 billion), funded jointly by Kioxia and U.S. partner SanDisk.
Target start: 2029 or later. CEO Hiroo Ota confirmed in a June investor briefing that discussions are already underway.
Where is the money coming from, and what role does the government play?
Kioxia has begun procurement talks with equipment makers and other suppliers, and plans to apply for subsidies from Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
This means → the investment is not purely corporate — Japan's semiconductor subsidy framework is a key enabler.
Kioxia executives will formally announce the plan at the Prime Minister's Office on Thursday. The venue choice signals this is a national-level project, not just a company expansion.
Why expand now?
Kioxia ranks third globally in NAND by value, behind Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix of South Korea.
Both Korean rivals have already announced large-scale domestic capacity investments. Without a response, Kioxia's market-share gap would only widen.
This reflects Japan's broader policy of treating chips as a strategic economic-security commodity — government ambition and Kioxia's commercial imperative are aligned at this moment.
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