Samsung Lost More than $268 Million During Power Shutdown in Texas (statesman.com) 198
The Austin-American Statesman reports that Samsung "lost at least $268 million due to damaged products after its semiconductor fabrication plant in Austin was shutdown during the February's Texas freeze, according to the company."
Samsung executives said the company's semiconductor business saw profits fall in the first quarter, mainly due to disruptions and product losses caused by the shutdown. Samsung's Austin fab was offline for more than a month after it was shut down due to power outages during the freeze... About 71,000 wafers were affected by production disruptions, said Han Jinman, executive vice-president of Samsung's memory chip business. He estimated the wafer loss is equivalent to $268 million to $357 million.
Semiconductor fabs are typically operational 24 hours a day for years on end. Each batch of wafers — a thin slice of semiconductor used for the fabrication of integrated circuits — can take 45 to 60 days to make, so a shutdown of any length can mean a loss of weeks of work. Restoring a fab is also a complicated process, and even in the best of circumstances can take a week... NXP Semiconductors was also among the facilities that were shut down in February, as its two Austin fabrication facilities were offline for nearly a month. In March, the company estimated the shutdown would result in a $100 million loss in revenue and a month of wafer production...
Jinman said Samsung is working with the state, municipal government and local utility companies to find solutions to prevent similar shutdowns in the future.
Semiconductor fabs are typically operational 24 hours a day for years on end. Each batch of wafers — a thin slice of semiconductor used for the fabrication of integrated circuits — can take 45 to 60 days to make, so a shutdown of any length can mean a loss of weeks of work. Restoring a fab is also a complicated process, and even in the best of circumstances can take a week... NXP Semiconductors was also among the facilities that were shut down in February, as its two Austin fabrication facilities were offline for nearly a month. In March, the company estimated the shutdown would result in a $100 million loss in revenue and a month of wafer production...
Jinman said Samsung is working with the state, municipal government and local utility companies to find solutions to prevent similar shutdowns in the future.
Needs a UPS (Score:5, Insightful)
You would think a plant like that would have a backup power supply.
Re:Needs a UPS (Score:5, Funny)
You would think a plant like that would have a backup power supply.
It's Texas. Taking common sense preparations for potential disasters is an afterthought. If you can't fix it by shooting it, it's not worth doing.
Re: Needs a UPS (Score:2)
It might be on shooty-nutty land, but It's Samsung though.
I don't go to Fukushima and build a factory without flood and yes-men protections either.
Examination (Score:3, Funny)
CFO: "Tax breaks, cheap uneducated labor."
Re:Needs a UPS (Score:5, Insightful)
You would think a plant like this would be located somewhere the power grid doesn't resemble that of a Third World country.
Re: (Score:2)
You'd think so, but when they built it in 1997 the power grid was still regulated by the State of Texas.
Re: (Score:2)
State regulatory control of power is irrelevant. Any company that'll suffer massive losses when power goes down invests a few million in on-site emergency generators.
My company does, and that's just to keep hundreds of embedded sw engineers moving so we don't miss fractional release dates on anual updates to dozens of products.
Re: (Score:2)
State regulatory control of power is irrelevant.
Ok, so guy not following the issue wants to blather. Go away, guy not following the issue.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, and the fab we are talking about needs 3 orders of magnitude more power than your silly embedded chip programmers office. Even if you push up air con to freezing temperatures.
The silliness of those third world monkey inhabitants keeps astonishing me day after day. And: also at night.
Re:Needs a UPS (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Needs a UPS (Score:2)
Re: Needs a UPS (Score:2)
The story does sound like the loss of money is from the idle time of the fab, rather than destroyed wafers.
Re: (Score:2)
A couple of tens of M$$ will provide a simple diesel backup that will work for a week -- more than enough time to get some tanker trucks.
For a waver fab that draws a gigawatt?
How many diesel Generators do you need to produce a gigawatt? Something like 300,000? Or did I miscalculate somewhere?
Re: (Score:2)
Hear, hear and well modded.
Story reminds me of when I was working for TI many years ago. They hadn't yet sold off their computer division. Around lunchtime someone dug up a power cable and the entire building went dark. Power was actually restored fairly soon, but the computers weren't able to reboot from that state. All of the patch servers were down and you needed a live patch server to boot your machine, so about 70 programmers were sitting around and doing nothing for most of the afternoon. (The patch s
Re: (Score:2)
Oh like say running off natural gas [statesman.com]?
Re: Needs a UPS (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you have any idea how much power a fab takes? To put this in terms you're likely to understand, it would take a battery the size of Texas.
Re: (Score:3)
On building scale batteries are only for bridging power, until the backup power source is online. You can run entire cities off diesel generators, Assuming you have the infrastructure setup and ready to go.
I don't know the specifics here though.
Re:Needs a UPS (Score:4, Interesting)
They are one of the largest Industrial power users in the state.
They were ordered to shutdown for an entire week.. probably what you are describing is impossible, which is to provide backup power for that long a time for the entire chip fab plant.
At least impossible without something like essentially building their own power plant with additional large-scale generators and making that the backup - That would make them a producer on the grid... seeing as generators of such capacity require minutes or hours to spin up, they'd have to be kept running, and during an emergency like the winter event - Assuming they still had a fuel supply and it was still working, they would likely still wind up getting ordered to disconnect their load from the grid, even while running their own generators.
Re:Needs a UPS (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if it would have cost less than $350 million to connect their fabs to the national grid instead of relying on a Third World government to make the power companies fix theirs.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not how power grids work. They don't let you cross the streams. And you don't have that other stream there locally to try.
Re:Needs a UPS (Score:5, Interesting)
REC Silicon's plant in Moses Lake used 45 to 50 MW back in the days when the Siemens reactors were running. If the power is out for 48 hours that is about 2.2 GW-hr of battery. They did look at a rather large set of diesels, but getting that set up was very expensive, and there was no guarantee that they would get up to speed and on line before the bridges dropped. As the rods cool the resistance goes up, and then you can't restart the reactor anyway. And a gas turbine won't start up nearly fast enough.
So after a cost benefit analysis, Management decided to settle for the occasional outage. Once every ten years isn't that big a deal when the criteria is that any capital spending must pay back in less than seven.
If Samsung had a CZ plant, then growing those ingots is a similar process that can not be interrupted.
Re:Needs a UPS (Score:5, Informative)
You would think a plant like that would have a backup power supply.
Back up power supply like the Eastern [wikipedia.org] and Western [wikipedia.org] Interconnections?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. The only form of UPS you can really have is your own power plant running as primary power and using the grid for backup power. You would run such a plant off natural gas, so if you needed on-site backup you would end up with liquified natural gas. In unseasonable cold, you would need to take special precautions to ensure the evaporators would continue to operate.
It gets really hard when you talk about a lot of power and very rare events, as making something sufficiently robust to be more reliabl
Re: (Score:3)
You would think a plant like that would have a backup power supply.
The only power supply capable of keeping a factory that size online for a month because The entire Texas power grid collapsed is building their own full blown power station with far better weather proofing than Texas regulations require (assuming Texas still has any). Samsung’s mistake was trusting the bozos that run Texas when they told Samsung that their grid was the best in the US because ... **deregulation**
Re:Needs a UPS (Score:5, Informative)
No, a backup supply could be achieved by connecting Texas' grid to the other grids.
This is a political issue: the reason Texas' grid is not connected to the other grids is to avoid federal regulation.
Texas' politics and politicians caused this problem.
Re:Needs a UPS (Score:5, Insightful)
No, a backup supply could be achieved by connecting Texas' grid to the other grids.
This is a political issue: the reason Texas' grid is not connected to the other grids is to avoid federal regulation.
Texas' politics and politicians caused this problem.
That is true, and connecting the Texas grid to other grids would be a good idea but it would also not be necessary if Texas regulations mandated proper weather proofing which is precisely what they are trying to avoid by not hooking up to the federal grid. If Texas wants to become some kind of high-tech hub it has to get used to the idea that squeezing a few more pennies out of the electricity grid through de-regulation is not going to be worth much in the long term if it causes month long electricity outages. On the other hand, if I was Samsung, I'd not build any kind of facility in Texas that relies on an un-interrupted electricity supply including this new chip fab: https://www.anandtech.com/show... [anandtech.com]
Re: (Score:2)
That alone would require hardening the natural gas infrastructure which was ~70% of the problem. Texas could not go from zero-import (or net-export) one day to requiring 50% import the next.
Re: (Score:3)
I could just image some PHB rejecting that idea because "The power company promised us they won't go down" and additionally "We can buy insurance". Of course the PHB won't actually check the fine print on that insurance and extreme weather is bound to be listed as an exempted condition.
Re: (Score:2)
Seems their "appropriate measures" [ft.com] didn't work.
Re: (Score:2)
You would think a plant like that would have a backup power supply.
And you are sure the plant did not have a backup power supply? Remember this outage was not an hour or a day for a small area. The power outage was at least a week for some areas. Also this was not isolated to just one area of Texas. The entire state needed power.
A normal backup supply is designed to take over temporarily and I cannot stress the word temporarily enough. It is designed to give the plant some time to switch over to alternate sources. In this case, what alternate source was available? Natural
Re: Needs a UPS (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
They could run the plant indefinitely.
That is not true. That plant would need diesel fuel. How much diesel fuel is required to generate 30MW and how much is stored onsite? Also what would happen if a snowstorm would cripple all transportation for a few days so that it may be a week or more before the plant gets more diesel fuel?
Re: Needs a UPS (Score:2)
The issue is that it's not a simple matter of just starting up "the line" again, there are steps which, if not completed, means you have to throw out the semi finished chips and start over. In that regard it's more like a bakery than a widget assembly line.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I have trouble finding exact figures through web search but FABs do have backup power supplies. They normally only operate the exhaust air handling and if you are lucky some of the process equipment for a few hours. If you really want to protect your FAB you need to build a power station, FABs use as much power as an automobile plant. Typical figures I was able to find say that they use as much power as 50,000 homes. Building a FAB in a third world country like Texas was obviously a mistake. South Korea, Ch
Re: (Score:2)
Yes.
For a layman that thought makes sense.
But having a 1GW power plant side by side to your fabrication plant only causes nightmares over nightmares.
What are you supposed to do, when power fails country wide?
Feed power to the freezing citizens around you, or keeping your plant running?
Do you actually have an idea how much power such a fabrication plant needs? That is not done with some failed Fukushima style back up diesel generators.
Re:Needs a UPS (Score:5, Informative)
A backup for something that happened just ten years ago.
These storms are a recurring problem. Only you cannot predict them.
Stop gaslighting you stupid Republican fucker. (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop gaslighting you stupid Republican fucker.
The exact thing has happened before. Everyone knew exactly how to fix the problem. Winterize the equiptment. But Texas said no, too expensive we'd rather just freeze die and lose lots of money.
Re:Needs a UPS (Score:5, Insightful)
And like we said last time this subject came up, climate change is a thing. This "but I never saw it coming" is going to get old after awhile because people have been saying for years what the consequences would be.
Re:Needs a UPS (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly what a lot of people said the last time it happened, what 10 years ago iirc. And there was this big outcry to winterize the grid. But big business collected their handouts as they were being told they needed to winterize for the next time, and then they DID NOTHING.
Big business in TX managed to twist the "you WILL winterize the grid" into "we STRONGLY SUGGEST you winterize the grid" by pulling the teeth out of the regulators. Because TEXAS we want our independence! (independence to continue to be idiots, apparently?)
So the recommendations were ignored. And then SURPRISE it happens again. And AGAIN "no one could have imagined this would have happened!"
Idiots that fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it. Sometimes I wonder if that club's headquarters is in TX.
Now you just watch, again we have public outcry to winterize the gid. How much you want to bet it doesn't happen and we do this AGAIN in another 10 years? And get to repeat "but no one could have anticipated this!". again.
It isn't enough to be blind to not see this pattern. At this point you have to be intentionally ignoring the facts to not see what's happening, and what's going to happen again.
Next I suppose you're going to tell me that wind and solar don't work when it's cold. I live in Iowa. "Iowa is the first state to generate more than 30 percent of its electricity with wind power. Iowa also ranks second nationally in the amount of wind energy installed with 6,952 MW (2016)" You got below freezing weather for a week? oh that's cute! We're typically below freezing continuously for 3 months of the year, most years dipping below -20F at some point in Jan. Wind and solar both work fine in the winter if your energy company's not run by morons.
"Independence" is a two-part thing. First part is isolating yourself, check, you got that. Second part is being able to take care of yourself. If you can't do the latter, trust me, don't do the former.
TL;DR: If you don't want it to happen again in a few years, you're going to have to either pressure or vote out the shills in your govt that are allowing the energy companies to save a few bucks by not winterizing your grid. Also, "independence" is a really BAD idea when talking about your energy grid, get *connected* to the national grid so if you DO have a problem like this, someone can actually help you rather than have to watch you shiver in the dark and cold for a week.
Re: (Score:2)
They were probably betting on Anthropogenic Global Warming to avoid a repeat. The Corporate types love the Gated Institutional Narrative.
Re: (Score:2)
Too bad it doesn't work that way.
First they deny it exists
Then they pretend it's beneficial
When it's too late, they panic.
Re: (Score:2)
As has been predicted for decades, now that the arctic polar ice has melted there will be more frequent continental extreme cold weather events.
Re: (Score:2)
"It is extremely difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair, "The Jungle". -- see, the benefits of liberal arts education! Good reading!
Re: (Score:2)
I'm stealing that.
Re:Needs a UPS (Score:5, Insightful)
Big business in TX managed to twist the "you WILL winterize the grid" into "we STRONGLY SUGGEST you winterize the grid" by pulling the teeth out of the regulators. Because TEXAS we want our independence! (independence to continue to be idiots, apparently?)
So the recommendations were ignored. And then SURPRISE it happens again. And AGAIN "no one could have imagined this would have happened!"
Idiots that fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it. Sometimes I wonder if that club's headquarters is in TX.
I don't know but they certainly have a very large chapter of the club.
"Independence" is a two-part thing. First part is isolating yourself, check, you got that. Second part is being able to take care of yourself. If you can't do the latter, trust me, don't do the former.
Funny how all the "independent" Texans that want the guvment are lining up for Federal aid. The Feds should have told them to drop dead, but they were already doing that anyway...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I was born in Houston, and it did snow once in the the five years or so I lived there. So, that has happened before.
Re: (Score:2)
A backup for something that has never happened before? It was snowing on the gulf coast southern beaches of Texas https://news.yahoo.com/snow-co... [yahoo.com] This winter storm is not a regular event anyone could have anticipated and prepared for.
Though I had seen snow on the ground before, the very first snowfall I ever experienced was in the mid-2000s when I was visiting my folks for Christmas and it was snowing as we exited a Christmas Eve candlelight service. My parents live in Galveston County, on the Gulf Coast, just southeast of Houston. I’ve experienced snowfall about a half dozen times since then, all in Texas, not too far from Houston.
This is neither new nor unforeseeable. The scope and duration was bigger than before, but colder wea
Re:Risk analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
It's risk analysis as done by executives. "If we spend money to winterize it will reduce profits and lower my stock value for 5-6 years. Storms like this only occur every decade or so, and I'll leave to go loot some other company within 7-8 years. There's no upside to me to winterize, so we'll take the winterization subsidy and spend it on stock buybacks."
Risk analysis as done by power engineers or insurance analysts would have called for winterizing the grid before it happened the previous time in 2011. Samsung and NXP should probably pay for either winterizing the portion of the grid they use, or for connecting to the national grid, since the gods know the Texas power companies won't do it on their own.
Texas Politicals be like (Score:4, Insightful)
"Wait a big company was impacted? OMG! I thought it was just poor people. We gotta do something about this."
Re: (Score:2)
If it hadn't been for slavery I sometimes think that it would have been better if Lincoln had just let the South go its own way. I wonder if he knew that 150 years later they would still be a financial drain on the North.
How they did lose it? (Score:2)
Was it due to fines, penalties on failed contracts... what?
Note: you can't lose a money you never had to start with so, no, failing estimations is not a lose.
Re: (Score:2)
The wash plant is down for 4 hours at a loss of 40k in gold.
Wait one second, Samsung and the gold miners lost 4 hours of time to make money and had some more OPX expenses and a few days the CAPX pay off is behind. Those chip sales are still out there, the line for NVIDA and AMD products is even longer, and FAB being a commodity the next unit of sales is at a higher margin.
Samsung is making a mint, perhaps they might spend a bit of that on a backup ge
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Samsung is making a mint, perhaps they might spend a bit of that on a backup generation or energy storage plant.
They could spend that money relocating to a first world country.
Re: (Score:2)
Name the place that doesn't have weird weather and power shutdowns once in a while.
Re: (Score:2)
Most of Europe?
Iceland? Renewable cheap electricity too.
Re: (Score:2)
They would have been better off in Anchorage or Fairbanks, if a large area there loses power for more than an hour the state regulators raise holy hell. The problem wasn't weather, since they get a storm like that every decade or so, the problem is that the state chooses to prioritize power company profits over rate payer well being. The entire Texas grid could have been winterized two decades ago for less than Samsung lost in this one incident, but you know as well as I do that the next time the exact sa
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: How they did lose it? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen it with my own eyes that while America is theoretically a first world country in terms of material wealth, it's run like a 3rd world country. This is very evident in LA where I live.
Also, don't think for a second that we value human life, no matter how much people lie through their teeth stating otherwise.
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure if you mean Los Angeles of Louisiana, but I guess it would be equally accurate in either location.
Re: How they did lose it? (Score:2)
Los Angeles. But I heard Louisiana is pretty bad too.
Remember what happened during Katrina:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2005/... [hrw.org]
New Orleans: Prisoners Abandoned to Floodwaters
Officers Deserted a Jail Building, Leaving Inmates Locked in Cells
Re:How they did lose it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you think the Fab was free to build, or did it cost billions?
Also now is the worst possible time, Samsung can't go to TSMC top get some more chips made and worldwide demand is already outstripping supply so all those failed wafers and lost production really are a loss.
The actual loss is in lost sales.
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, not only you *can* lose money you never had, but you can also get insured for such a loss. Large companies will insure their production output, that can amount to hundreds of millions of dollars like the one in this case, so that they get paid by the insurance in case the production comes to a halt. They not only get insurance for the material damages, but also for the lost revenue they would have had if the production could have continued. The insurance claims can be ridiculous enough that re-ins
Re: (Score:2)
Of course you can. Here try this: Go bake a bread, but rather than finish baking it about 1/3rd of the way through the process turn off the bread maker. Then separate the raw ingredients and put them back in their packaging.
When you realise you can't unbake a half baked bread get out your calculator and figure out how much money you lost as a result of not getting a bread you never had in the first place.
For the sake of discussion we'll assume: You're not a wizard who can just magic ingredients into existen
No backup power? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, Samsung? You are telling me, you built a massive factory, and you didn't even have any backup power to shut down gracefully? It all ran directly off the grid, live by the grid, die by the grid?
Are you insane?
You manufacture batteries, for god's sake!
Re:No backup power? (Score:5, Insightful)
They probably had on-side tens-of-kW diesel generators, and/or a battery UPS (for the changeover to diesel once the power went and the jennys are still starting) - however they probably didn't figure the utilities would be incompetent enough to let the grid get into a state where it would be down for more than a day at the most.
In reality, the fuckwits in charge of the grid got it into such a state that it was off for over 2 weeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I would not consider Texas as a serious place to build a plant until that fuckwittery with infastructure is sorted out.
Re:No backup power? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
> Yes, lack of tree trimming. Oh, and that same lack of tree trimming caused me to be out twice before in Jan/Feb for 8+ hours.
Do you have backup power? Seems like it's very predictable that the monopoly power supply is unreliable and most people would have backups.
Re: (Score:2)
Tree trimming and substation maintenance are generally the first casualties to executives looking for short-term cost cutting to bump up share price. That was what caused the big Northeast power outage, untrimmed trees shorted out high tension lines, unmaintained relays had corroded shut, power lines shuttled energy the wrong direction, and the failure cascaded. In my area you can tell if the lines are maintained by the Public Utility District or the for-profit Puget Sound Energy at a glance, the PUD is a
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
5 days? A decade or so ago much of the northeast was without power for 3+ weeks because of untrimmed trees.
Re: (Score:2)
My part of Austin was down for 5 days, because the city refuses to trim trees.
This happened where I live. The local power company had cut back on forestry work for about a decade. Then we had major, long lasting outages due to two weather events in the same year. First, there was a major storm in the summer with 80mph+ straight line winds across a huge swath of the metro area I live in. It took more than a week for all power to be restored. Then about 6 months later we had a big ice storm caused power outages for many of those who were not affected by the summer storm. My power was
Re: (Score:3)
Tens of kWs would not be much for a plant like that, it would essentially be emergency lighting and other life-safety power. I've worked on a 400,000 sq ft office building that had
Re: (Score:2)
They probably had on-side tens-of-kW diesel generators, and/or a battery UPS (for the changeover to diesel once the power went and the jennys are still starting)
I wonder how big the backup batteries have to be to allow a diesel start properly and not do a cold start to load in 15 seconds, which is very hard on a D/G.
Re: (Score:3)
I wonder how big the backup batteries have to be to allow a diesel start properly and not do a cold start to load in 15 seconds, which is very hard on a D/G.
A properly specced generator that size will have coolant and oil heaters to keep the engine warm so it pretty much just needs to get the engine spinning at whatever RPM the generator head needs to make 60Hz and it is ready to take the full rated load. IIRC (from a conversation with someone who was the head of maintenance for a hospital in CA a few years back) similar generators in a hospital setting are required to supply the full nameplate capacity in ~10 seconds from when grid power is lost.
Aaron Z
Re: No backup power? (Score:2)
Put huge amounts of Samsung batteries next to their factory? They are stupid (or shortsighted/cheap) to rely on the grid, but not insane to rely on their batteries! ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: No backup power? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fabs do have separate UPS power lines running in the fab and certain equipment will be wired to it. Like moving equipment that could crash or break if the power went off suddenly. But this is a tiny fraction of their demand.
If it were economical they would do it. The closest thing would be to build their own power plant. Sone big universities have their own power plants for example. But it's doubtful they could do much better than the regular grid.
Source: in the business for decades and been through multiple fab power outages in 3 different states, always painful. A 100ms "bump" in power is enough to cause a massive disruption, and power going totally off for mor than 5min is basically going to require a cold start. in terms of damage done. One of them (coincidentally in TX) was caused by a snake. Apparently they design switching stations so that squirrel, etc can't bridge the gaps but snakes...
Re: (Score:2)
How much do they need and how much backup-power does $250M buy?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: No backup power? (Score:2)
A dedicated power plant is a realistic option, as I already mentioned, but grid uptime is actually so good that you probably couldn't beat it with your own plant.
Re: (Score:2)
How much do they need and how much backup-power does $250M buy?
Right now, for a single case you could for $250m cover a fab plant. But the reality is you're never talking about a single case. Spending $250million to build a backup power system also means maintenance (and not the cheap kind), knowhow to run and operate it (which is not a core competence necessarily for a fab), and the *hope* that the power will one day cut out making it all worthwhile.
Overall it's an incredibly poor business decision to invest $250m with ongoing costs and absolutely no predictable ROI t
Texas' grid was down for almost a week (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
How do you shut a fab down gracefully ? You have a constant need for huge air filtration systems, high vacuum systems, cryogenics, furnaces, ion implantation etc etc etc. There are some seriously nasty chemicals involved - you do not want to be near some of the acids used for etching if the fume extraction systems go out.
If you can't finish a production batch in the furnace it's now scrap. If you can't finish an implant run, it's all scrap. If you can't finish an etch run, it's all scrap.
If you can't keep t
Texas GOPolitics Works for ...? (Score:2)
Texas, USA A place to work without a place to live is just U$A politics as usual.
USA Labor Policy or U$A Work, Pray, Die policy for #AllOfUS.
For companies migrating to Texas.. (Score:3)
I'm surprised more haven't factored this event into the cost of doing business in Texas.
Re:For companies migrating to Texas.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
And their software still sucks (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Their software sucks because it reflects their real attitude towards customers.
The USA is a first world country (Score:2)
That's what people believe. WHY?
Good (Score:2)
Stupidity should be painfully expensive.
The government only responds to the wealthy so if they want reliable power they should so direct the politicians they own. Samsung losses are just paper losses by which no human is hurt, but losing delicious money enrages the greedy.
Samsung itself should invest in enough backup to run for six months (it's only money and they have more than enough for fuel they will eventually buy either way) without outside power. In other news most of us don't buy asswipe by the sh
That's a small.... (Score:2)
price to pay for Freedumb. At least no bad goobermint peepole interfered.*
*Except to save people's lives. That seems okay. Tell them they can't drag a homosexual behind a truck though and you're back to 'infringin' on dere raights.'. Funny that.
Compared to? (Score:2)
How much have they saved manufacturing in Texas? They are there for a reason.
Re: (Score:2)
They're probably looking at if it would cost less than the damage to run lines from their fabs to the national grid. Texas isn't likely to allow that.
Re: (Score:2)
Even at a million dollars a mile (and Texas is likely to be cheaper than that, since there aren't any mountains or forests in the way) it would still be a good deal. Unlikely the state would allow that, though.
Re: (Score:3)
Also, just about anything else you hook up to a battery. But as you point out, the problem was that the Texas power grid is worthless thanks to runaway deregulation. In that kind of investment climate, nothing's going to fix it. Samsung would be wise to pack up and move to a First World state.