March 6, 2006 – Toshiba Corp. plans to spend 500 billion yen (roughly US $4.3 billion) to build a fourth plant at its Yokkaichi facility to make NAND flash memory chips. Construction would begin by year’s end, with production possibly beginning in early 2007, and full production of 100,000 300mm wafers/month at an undetermined date.

With the new site, and adding capacity to its third plant at the site, Toshiba hopes to catch global memory leader Samsung by tripling its output capacity to 250,000 wafers/month from its four facilities by fiscal 2008.

Toshiba already has increased its 2006 capex budget three times already to about $2.44 billion.