The opening of a 40,000 wafer a month NAND flash memory chip fab in Korea by Hynix next month could be good news for consumers, but bad news for rival suppliers such as IM Flash, the struggling joint venture in NAND flash between Intel and Micron Technology.

Hynix has budgeted to spend $6.5bn on new memory manufacturing capacity this year.

With Toshiba also budgeting NAND capex at around $6bn a year, with a determination to double its market share and overtake Samsung as the leading producer, the supply of NAND looks well assured, at very favourable prices to the consumer, for the foreseeable future.

Hynix actually calls its fab a 200,000 wafer a month facility, though it is initially only equipped for 40,000 wafers per month. The fab will make only NAND flash and will kick off making 16Gbit and 32Gbit devices on a 40nm process.