Axcelis has broken ground on a $35 million Korean factory expansion, putting more chipmaking equipment production close to its major Asian customers.
According to Evertiq, the Pyeongtaek facility will expand Axcelis’s existing Asia Operations Centre, with production scheduled for the second half of 2028.
The building will provide roughly 18,600 square metres of floor space, including warehousing, Class 1,000 and Class 10,000 cleanrooms and a training centre.
Axcelis makes ion implantation equipment used in semiconductor manufacturing. Such machinery attracts less attention than the finished processors, although chip factories would have a fairly quiet afternoon without it.
South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources said the groundbreaking took place on 20 October 2026 at the Oseong Industrial Complex.
The existing operations centre opened in 2021 and is Axcelis’s only manufacturing facility outside the US. It supplies customers including Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix and exports equipment to China, Japan, and Singapore.
The expansion will broaden the site’s role beyond manufacturing to include research and development, prototype production and technical training.
The ministry expects the investment to improve equipment supply and support closer cooperation with Korean component and materials suppliers.
Axcelis announced the investment plan in September. Construction now turns that announcement into something that requires concrete, cleanrooms, and considerably more effort than a press release. The company has not disclosed how many jobs the new facility will create or quantified the additional production capacity.
