Samsung DRAM and NAND production facility suffers power outage

There has been talk of NAND and DRAM supply getting back on track this year but sometimes, unforeseen circumstances can get in the way. This time around, one of Samsung's fabrication plants has suffered a power outage and while the power was down for only one minute, it will take several days of downtime to assess the damage caused. 

On New Year's Eve, Samsung's Hwaeseong plant lost power for one minute, putting a stop to NAND and DRAM production. According to Yonhap News Agency, Samsung expects the short outage to cause two or three days of downtime before production restarts, although this shouldn't set back production timelines too much.

The downtime is estimated to cause a financial hit in the ‘few billion won' range, which would equal a couple of million US dollars. That's a pretty big bill for such a short power cut, which was caused by a power transmission cable exploding at a nearby substation.

Even so, this isn't the biggest set back to occur from a power outage at one of Samsung's facilities. Back in 2018, a 30 minute power cut led to $43.3 million worth of wafers being scrapped, so this latest incident is minor by comparison.

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KitGuru Says: We'll likely hear a bit more about this later in the week once the damage has been fully assessed. Samsung is one of the largest memory producers in the world, so power outages can be a big issue but in this case, it looks like things will be back up and running swiftly and hopefully won't cause production timelines to slip too much. 

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